How to understand and work with your inner critic so you can finally reach your big career goals (with Alla Minkina)
We all have an inner critic. It gets loud exactly when something important is on the table: stepping into a new role, speaking in front of senior stakeholders, being the only woman in a technical room, pushing for a promotion, or wondering if it is time to make a career change.
In this online session, our amazing WMN& member Alla Minkina, Leadership Coach and Head of Learning & Development Tech at Adyen, will use the Positive Intelligence (PQ) saboteur framework to help you name your own saboteur and understand why its thoughts feel so real that they can talk you out of going for the goals you want to reach. She’ll walk through the 9 saboteurs and bring a real scenario to life through a live role play with Jennifer Paine, Co-Founder of WMN& and Career Coach for Women in Tech, so you can see exactly how these saboteurs show up and learn how to handle them.
By the end of the session, you’ll have language for what’s going on in your head, and a way of working with it that’s kinder and far more useful than trying to push it away.
Participants are invited (not required) to take the free PQ Saboteur Assessment before the session. Having your top saboteurs in mind can make the examples and the live role play more concrete. The link to the assessment will also be shared again afterwards for anyone who wants to explore it in their own time.
💡 You will learn
A simple, non‑technical overview of the 9 PQ saboteurs and how they often show up in everyday work situations:
Over‑preparing for every presentation “just in case they ask something I don’t know”.
Not speaking up in a meeting because “they’ve probably thought of this already”.
Saying yes to everything because “I don’t want to be difficult”, then resenting it.
How to notice when it is “just you thinking” vs a familiar sabotaging pattern taking over.
A few practical ways to respond when you catch a saboteur in action, instead of automatically believing it or fighting it.
How you might use people around you (peers, managers, coaches, friends) in a more intentional way when you are stuck in your own head.
👩💻 About the hosts
Alla Minkina is a Leadership Coach and Head of Learning & Development Tech at Adyen. She has spent her career in and around tech, building teams and supporting leaders through growth, reorganisations, and career pivots. In her coaching, she uses the Positive Intelligence saboteur framework as a practical tool to help people understand what is going on in their head, especially in high‑stakes moments, and to make decisions that fit the career they actually want rather than the one their inner critic will settle for.
Jennifer Paine is a co-founder of WMN& and a Career Coach for Women in Tech. She worked as a recruiter before pivoting to Tech Sales, where she worked at LinkedIn, Contentful and HiBob. She left corporate in 2023 and has helped 75+ women land their next roles in Tech. The same topics around career growth, networking, belonging as a woman in Tech, getting promoted and AI kept coming up in her coaching sessions, which ended up being the foundation of starting WMN&.