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. Podcast swag Salesforce Admins on the Trailhead Store Learn more Trailblazer Group: Salesforce Mental Health + Illness Group (Virtual) How I Solved It: Harness the Power of AI, Flow, and Slack to Summarize and Notify Users Admin Trailblazers Group Admin Trailblazers Community Group Social Katie on LinkedIn Salesforce Admins on LinkedIn Salesforce Admins on X Mike on Threads Mike on Tiktok Mike on X 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 ...
