Highly recommend practising some stoicism my good person.

You can control: 1. Your actions and reactions 2. Your desires 3. Your character 4. How you treat others

Everything else is outside your control and not worth worrying about.

Do you need to speak or perform? Is the audiences reaction to your performance within your control? No. Are the audiences opinion of you as a person within your control? No.

Is your anxiety within your control? Partially. Is preparing a good speech or performance within your control? Yes Is your character and how you present yourself within your control? Yes. Do you present well? Speak well? Are person of good character worth listening to? Do you treat others well and with respect?

Prepare and perform the best you can, be of good character and treat others well and anything outside of that is not in your control and not worth worry about.

I’d argue against having no control of how others react/percieve you.

Perform well - others will most likely think highly of you.

Perform poorly - you’re getting fired.

Stoicism should be taken with a grain of salt.

I wouldn’t take those outcomes as given at all. Could also easily be:

Perform well - someone feels threatened.

Perform poorly - reflects poorly on your boss if their boss finds out.

But more common in my experience:

Perform well or badly - no one gives a shit.

In my opinion, the problem arises from the belief that "I have control over how others think of me."

One way to think about the nature of this question is to consider: "Do I also believe that 2 different people will think the exact same thing of me in the same situation? What about 10 different people?"

I had a mentor who really worked with me to develop the belief that "what other people think of me, is none of my business." It isn't easy to do but for me it is very helpful.

Values come first. Then figure out what pain your willing to sustain.

Cannot recommend the Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck enough. Read it and you'll figure out your values and your purpose.

I'm exactly the same as you @danielvaughn.

I like Figma but everything in the design tools space feels like it light years behind dev tool. Particularly around anything to do with tokens.

Tokens are just variables. Ideally you should be able to reference one token with another token (ala variables) and NO DESIGN TOOL DOES THIS. It's maddening.

Right??? I just want to say "here are my colors, here are some spacing values, here are some font families". Then I want to be able to compose them into text styles and the like, etc etc. It feels like this shouldn't be a hard thing to build.

I know you said free but honestly Refactoring UI + Tailwind CSS is going to be your best bang for buck.

Read the book, then put it into practice with Tailwind CSS. Practice by trying to replicate their Tailwind UI examples by yourself.

Spend $100 to learn something right, save infinite time going down the wrong paths for nothing.

thanks for the info. I have decided to go for Refactoring UI. I use tailwind in my project anyway. ^ ^