Shoes

We’ve officially crossed the halfway mark of this whirlwind decade. So unsurprisingly, I’ve been reflecting on the biggest transformations in my life since 2020.

What’s been the single most game-changing transformation of the past 5 years?

No, it’s not generative AI or ChatGPT (but they do deserve a major shoutout).

It’s the normalization of work sneakers for women.

Pre-pandemic, I never felt “allowed” to wear sneakers anywhere but the gym. There was this unspoken rule: Women could wear:

• Canvas shoes
• Ballet flats
• Boots
• Heels

Or even clogs! But sneakers? If you couldn’t hack the commute in heels, you were shamed into stealthily swapping them out a block from the office.

By my late 20s, this unspoken rule was costing me – literally and figuratively. My feet hurt, my back hurt, and my doctor even blamed my lack of supportive footwear.

Enter: The pandemic.

Suddenly, sneakers paired perfectly with athleisure and wide-leg pants (bye, skinny jeans!). Sneakers became the shoe.

I started wearing them all the time. And the trend stuck! Years later, sneakers are still everywhere in the office. And I’m thrilled. My feet feel good, my back feels better, and my life has honestly changed from one small footwear adjustment.

Where am I going with this?

Wearing sneakers to the office was an unspoken rule. Nobody outright said you couldn’t do it… but did you dare?

Before I got into tech sales at Zendesk (in my combat-boot-high-heel era), I never thought I could actually understand the tech I was selling.

But no one explicitly said, “Alice, you’re not smart enough to grasp what a CPU, API, or Kubernetes is.”

It was an unspoken rule. Just like sneakers.

I wasn’t good at math.

I nearly failed chemistry.

Physics? Never even tried.

I was a wordsmith, a people person – I didn’t think I had a “tech brain.”

But as I worked under pressure to sell enterprise CRM and API-based integrations, I made one small change to how I approached tech.

I didn’t need to code to understand code.

I didn’t need to build tech to sell it.

I just needed to learn how to talk about it. And be unafraid of the unspoken rules because, guess what? They’re NOT REAL!

This mindset shift gave me the context to see the bigger picture, the concepts to explain the value, and the confidence to lead conversations without praying no one asked a technical question.

It’s the exact approach I use to teach AEs, SCs, and CSMs in Speak Software, Sell Smarter: Concepts Over Code.

And it changed my life.

This shift took me from Associate SC to Senior SC in 3 years, lining me up for the most lucrative sales territories in SF and UK fintechs. It gave me financial security for the first time in my life.

And it can do the same for you.

You don’t need to make a huge change to “get technical.”

And you sure as hell don’t need to wear heels.

You just need to build a solid tech and SaaS foundation you can use forever.

Sometimes, we don’t question things until someone else does. Like wearing sneakers to the office.