Latest / The One Small Change Podcast / Embracing Curiosity for Lasting Connections with Dave Howard
Transcript
- 0:00Welcome back to another episode of the One Small Change.
- 0:04And as always, I'm thrilled that you took time out of your busy schedule
- 0:08to come and share exploration and something that might
- 0:12help you transform. As always, I'm your host Yvonne McCoy,
- 0:16and I bring almost 30 years of entrepreneurial spirit,
- 0:19experience, and passion for discovering the power of seemingly
- 0:23small changes. And I wanna thank you again for joining me. And
- 0:27this week, we are talking with Dave Howard.
- 0:30Dave and I have a passion for learning and learning in
- 0:34ways that are relevant and useful. And so we're gonna talk
- 0:38about how small and unexpected and insignificant
- 0:41decisions, can really spark a remarkable transformation
- 0:45and a growth in both your personal and your professional life.
- 0:49So, Dave, I am so glad that you're here. You and
- 0:53I spend a lot of time together, in the course
- 0:57of a month. And so our our challenge is
- 1:01gonna be to stay focused.
- 1:04So tell me we're already off to that brand.
- 1:08Oh, tell me tell me what's a small
- 1:12change and how it changed your business and and
- 1:16made it what you're doing now? Well, I think it's
- 1:19interesting. I used to think a lot about setting goals
- 1:23and having large aspirations to work towards
- 1:27and then breaking them down into little subtests and doing all those various and sundry
- 1:30things. And I started to realize that that's often really challenging to
- 1:34do, and you still end up with a lot of larger than you'd like chunks
- 1:37to work with. And I think maybe part of what changed some of my thinking
- 1:41around this was reading Atomic Habits and realizing that it's really all about the
- 1:44little things that you do every day or the little things that you do
- 1:48as part of an overall direction that makes a difference. And I
- 1:52realized that that is particularly true, I think, about the way we learn and
- 1:56the way that we should learn, which is not to try to cram everything we
- 1:59need to know something about into half an hour or a
- 2:0315 minute workshop or 6 hours of training. But to be able to
- 2:07learn in smaller chunks may be able to learn when it's
- 2:10relevant for us to know that particular thing and to go back and learn more.
- 2:14And that's what I think engages people and interest them, and that's the kind of
- 2:17learning we all do every day. So that's
- 2:21really what I think is the key is small changes in learning,
- 2:24small changes in understanding the world around you, and the things that you do in
- 2:28your business make a huge difference over time. They compound.
- 2:33Well, I think one of the things that that we've shared in the past
- 2:37is that the world is changing very
- 2:40quickly. And so whether you know it or not or whether you
- 2:44do it consciously or not, we are all put in
- 2:48a situation where we really you either need to learn or
- 2:52you start to stagnate and fall behind. It's
- 2:55you know? And so can you address that a little bit?
- 3:00Sure. I I think you know, it's interesting. I spent some
- 3:03time looking at customer education organizations that work
- 3:07on trying to take people who sign up for their software
- 3:11or their program of one kind or another and educate them how to use it
- 3:14effectively. And very often that education is just
- 3:17absolutely dreadful. It it doesn't really meet the needs of people. It doesn't
- 3:21solve their their challenges. It doesn't move them forward in a particular
- 3:25way. And so I think the answer in many cases to the to
- 3:29the issue of what's the right kind of learning to be doing, it's the kind
- 3:33of learning that makes sense to the learner in the context of the
- 3:36circumstance. And so very often, what I think we see is people
- 3:40providing a lot of learning resources or a lot of course
- 3:43content that they never take the time to explain or
- 3:47to understand how it's relevant to the learner. And then that
- 3:51is what motivates us to continue to learn. We do continue to learn
- 3:55in the directions that are important to us. If we need to figure out the
- 3:58new system at the supermarket so that we can buy food and feed our family,
- 4:02we figure it out. It's not hard to learn, we do it. If it's important
- 4:05for us to know something out onto the job or in our business, we take
- 4:08the time to learn it. But unless we see the relevance of that learning, unless
- 4:11we see the importance of it, then it's hard to maintain that. Yet we're still
- 4:15learning every day. We're learning about the things that matter to us, not about the
- 4:19things that we can't find relevance for. Well, you
- 4:23know, I've told you this story before that when I did workforce
- 4:26training, I would show up and I'd say, this is what we're
- 4:30gonna, you know, this is what we're gonna work on. You know,
- 4:33what why are you here? And they would say, because I was told to be
- 4:37here. And I'd say, well, it since you are here,
- 4:42let's find something that would make this useful for you in your life.
- 4:46Do you know? And then I then I got buy in. Then I got people
- 4:50to say, okay, I wanna I wanna do this. I wanna, you know, I
- 4:53wanna be involved in this. I wanna learn something. And I think the other
- 4:57thing is that, you know, in school, in the time
- 5:01frame that we were in, I think, we were not taught to be
- 5:05curious about things, you know, and kind of like, if you
- 5:09do this, then what's gonna happen? You you know, the our training
- 5:12was pretty much just do this. You know, there's a
- 5:16right or wrong answer. You're not taught to be curious.
- 5:20You know? And I just found an article that said,
- 5:24some of the signs some of the things that your
- 5:28children do that drive you crazy are signs that they're probably, you know, highly
- 5:31intelligent. You know, like, taking things apart and using them in different
- 5:35ways where as parents, you know, or our parents at
- 5:39least would say, don't do that. You know?
- 5:43Don't take that apart. Leave leave it the way it is. You
- 5:46know? And I think that that's a belief that
- 5:50we have to overcome. And again, I
- 5:54think part of that is because things are moving so fast. So give
- 5:58me some if you can, I don't wanna put you on spot, but have you
- 6:01got a some examples either in your own life or,
- 6:05with clients where you found having just that shift in the way
- 6:09they view learning
- 6:12has changed how they learned and and the, you know, the rate that
- 6:16they learned? Sure. Sure. One of the things that you know
- 6:20that, you you and I and and our our
- 6:24good colleague, Rob Rooter, like to work on is something called flipbooks. And digital
- 6:27flipbooks are you've probably seen them. There are pages that turn
- 6:31when you go through a document and you've probably seen a number of them and
- 6:34thought that they were particularly dull, boring and uninteresting other than the fact that the
- 6:38page has turned. And what Rob discovered a while ago is that you
- 6:42can do almost anything you want with a flipbook. And so he brought that to
- 6:45me, and I had seen them before. And, of course, I thought immediately, they're dumb.
- 6:48They're not particularly useful. But then I thought, I should be curious about
- 6:52this. Why does Rob think that this is valuable?
- 6:56There's somebody I respect, and I want to understand why it is that he
- 6:59sees value in it. And when I was curious, and I had him explain to
- 7:02me what he saw, all of a sudden I thought, wow. This is a
- 7:06tremendously underutilized resource. This is something that we could be
- 7:10making very engaging, very interesting and
- 7:13involving learning for people online using this simple
- 7:17technology that's been around forever and is proven. So that's one
- 7:21example of being curious. Another example of being curious is,
- 7:25you know, that, we've also been working on the idea of taking some ideas
- 7:29from few thought leaders, Cathy Sierra in a book that she wrote
- 7:32called Badass Making Users Awesome, Vanessa Cirroli who talks
- 7:36about the experience of going around the world and really listening to what people
- 7:40need and then finding a way to help them. And Michelle Thomas who
- 7:43believe that people who create learning are responsible for the success of
- 7:47that learning, not the learner. And what strikes me about that
- 7:51in particular perhaps is Ernesto Cirroli's idea that you can't really help
- 7:55people unless you shut up and listen, unless you're curious
- 7:59about what it is they're trying to accomplish, unless you're curious about what do
- 8:03they know how to do and what do they not know how to do, unless
- 8:06you're curious about where are the opportunities that they don't see
- 8:09that you can help them to see. And it's that taking the time to be
- 8:13curious and to open up to those things that I think makes all the
- 8:17difference in the world. And so when we've had success in taking
- 8:20clients of ours and encouraging them to look at flipbooks, it
- 8:24usually is because we had them be curious about how how this
- 8:27technology is different and look at it from a curious perspective and
- 8:31say, what could we do with this? And pretty soon we're in this conversation where
- 8:35it's saying, oh, well, could we do this? And we're yeah. Absolutely. We could do
- 8:38that. That would be that would be great. And we end up with this interactive,
- 8:41engaging learning resource that the user is curious about
- 8:45too. They wanna turn the page and see what comes up next. They wanna do
- 8:48the next exercise, watch the next video, and they are engaged in
- 8:52it much more so. And all of that comes back to curiosity. So I
- 8:56100% agree with you about curiosity. Well, I I'm I'm
- 9:00I'm gonna, kinda jump on your toes a little bit by saying you're gonna
- 9:03give us, a link to a flip book, right,
- 9:07for a learning community that we're both very passionate about,
- 9:11called the All For One Academy. And one of the other
- 9:15things that we talked about about that is that too
- 9:19often, when we put ourselves as the expert and the
- 9:23person who has all the knowledge, we kinda shut down
- 9:26the channels of engagement as opposed to saying I mean, this is what I
- 9:30with I was not taught to be a teacher, but when I got
- 9:34into training and teaching, I you know, I was like, I wasn't quite
- 9:38sure of my skills. And so I would always say to the people,
- 9:42if you don't understand it, it's not you. It's me.
- 9:46I haven't said it in a way that makes sense. And I
- 9:49think that is a huge shift in terms of
- 9:53you know, because then people are not saying, I don't get it. I'm not
- 9:57interested. I'm, you know, they're not connecting with me, that kind
- 10:00of thing. And I and I think the other thing is,
- 10:08you know, we all learn in different ways. So, you know, if you're if you
- 10:11don't know, there's the visual, the audio, and the kinetic. And the
- 10:15more way we we use them all, but we are more in tune
- 10:19with 1 or 2 than all 3 of them. And when
- 10:23I first started taking, they weren't online courses. They
- 10:26were on the phone courses. And I'm very visual.
- 10:30I had to have a toy to play with because I'm visual kinetic. I have
- 10:33to see things and feel things. And I actually had to play with a
- 10:37toy in order for me to be able to focus and listen
- 10:41to the class. And so the more ways that you can get out
- 10:44into the people that you wanna attract to the potential clients,
- 10:48whether it's video, whether it's,
- 10:52you know, a podcast, whether it is, you know, written,
- 10:56the better chance you have of interacting with them and bringing
- 11:00them into your sphere.
- 11:04I think we talked about a couple of other things. We talked about, you
- 11:08know, not making yourself the expert, but being
- 11:11open to people. Oh, I know what I wanted to say. When
- 11:15we're in the All For One, academy, and
- 11:19we do our our monthly, you know, meetings, we
- 11:23do an exercise that I think is really based on
- 11:27curiosity, and I don't know if you wanna share that or not. Sure. Sure. Yeah.
- 11:30I think that's one of the unique things that we've adapted from a couple of
- 11:34different places, and Rob sort of introduced part of it. And then another member of
- 11:38the academy actually suggested some, really interesting
- 11:41ideas and twists on it. And the idea is a clarity exercise.
- 11:45And the purpose of the exercise is for someone to bring a challenge or something
- 11:49they're working on and pose it to the group, and then
- 11:53have people not provide suggestions for answers,
- 11:56not provide, oh, in my experience, this works or that works, but to say,
- 12:00here are the questions you should be asking yourself. And
- 12:04it's based on the philosophy that the answers lie within for most of us. Most
- 12:08of us have all of the pieces that we need once we
- 12:11clarify a few things to make the right decision for us in the right circumstance.
- 12:15And if we're making it based on our internal feelings and our internal understanding,
- 12:19it's going to be in alignment with how we wanna go ahead and and work
- 12:22with that later. So it's gonna be more successful because it's not
- 12:25imposing something on us. It's in alignment with our with our own
- 12:29thinking. And so the idea is there are no answers provided.
- 12:32There are no suggested solutions. There's no discussion.
- 12:36It's just a collection of questions that you take away where you
- 12:40can sit back and ponder and say, well, that's a really good question. What's my
- 12:44answer to the question about why is this important to me? Or what's
- 12:47the my answer to the question of why would I do
- 12:51this versus that? And the questions allow you
- 12:55to really let it percolate and come together in a way that makes sense
- 12:59and that actually gets you faster to a solution
- 13:03than trying to evaluate a bunch of different people's suggestions or
- 13:07whether their opinions, whether they're factual, whether they would work for you, whether they
- 13:11won't. None of that comes into it. You're just simply asking yourself
- 13:14intelligent questions, and I think that's a great way to go.
- 13:18And what what was kind of the unexpected? One of the things we said is
- 13:21we don't want you to say it verbally. We want you to put it in
- 13:24the chat. And what was one of the unexpected things that came out of
- 13:28that? Well, I think the fact that people
- 13:32became very thoughtful and they really kind of took away a whole
- 13:36list of opportunities and things that they could see, They appreciated
- 13:40the peace and quiet, the ability for everybody to just work on their own ideas
- 13:44and questions and contribute it. So there wasn't any competition for
- 13:47well, here's my suggestion, and I'm listening to your suggestions now and forgetting
- 13:51my own. Everybody was just contributing them together. Only took about 5
- 13:55minutes or so. And invariably, the people we've done it with have said,
- 13:59it was a very powerful exercise to be the a participant in both from
- 14:02the questioning standpoint. Often people realize questions they have themselves
- 14:06that they haven't been contemplating about their own business. But also for
- 14:10the person who's at the center of receiving all these questions, really powerful to
- 14:14have that much focus on them and their issue and their circumstance
- 14:17without having to kind of evaluate all those various things. I'm not sure if that's
- 14:21what you're thinking about, but that Well, that that that was what I was thinking
- 14:24about. But I think, the other thing that we realized was that the
- 14:28questions that people posted, when you looked at
- 14:32that whole list of questions, it was a great list of questions for you
- 14:35too. Yeah. That's true. Everybody, actually, even though you were
- 14:39doing it for that one person, the questions were really
- 14:43good questions for you to ask about your own business. And I found
- 14:47that because I it's really I mean, the reason I say
- 14:51be curious not judgmental is because I spent most of my life being
- 14:55very judgmental and telling
- 14:59You know, coming from the manager model, we need to get it done. This is
- 15:02what you need to do. And so when you realize that you're
- 15:06making a question, your first inclination is, this is what you should
- 15:09do. And just having to make a question out of
- 15:13that, you know, what's the question that led me to
- 15:17that solution? Or what was the piece do you know? Made
- 15:20me stop and go, okay.
- 15:24What's the question that I need to come up with? And it
- 15:28stopped me from, you know, being judgmental and
- 15:31saying this is what you need to do. And so the sharing,
- 15:36even though you're sitting there in silence,
- 15:40actually was going back and forth, if that makes any sense. Yeah. Yeah. And
- 15:44I I think it's really powerful that everybody, because it's in the chat, can go
- 15:47away with a copy of the questions and figure out, oh, which ones of these
- 15:50are relevant from or what did this trigger for me, or what did I think
- 15:53about with respect to this? So you're right. There's a lot of value there. And
- 15:57that I think is sometime I think, you know, we had this theme
- 16:01today of curiosity. And I think part of it is, as you start to
- 16:04think of the questions you're going to recommend this person think about,
- 16:08you're being curious about the issue yourself. You're being curious about
- 16:12what would my questions be about this. What would I want to
- 16:16know if I was in that circumstance? And I think that's a a
- 16:19very, very powerful place to be instead of
- 16:22evaluating answers, evaluating questions, or entertaining
- 16:26questions. And, you know, I think I'm reminded of it, and it's a little bit
- 16:29of a stretch. But, you know, that on my email, I have a quote from
- 16:33Alan Alda at the end where he says, one of the things he's learned
- 16:36is I'm not I've come to understand I'm not really listening unless I'm
- 16:40prepared to be changed by what you say. Something along that lines.
- 16:44And I think that's a really powerful reason to be curious.
- 16:48Because when you're curious, the opportunity is there for you to get a new
- 16:51perspective, to understand things from a different view, to see
- 16:55how something could be different than you understood it before and use that
- 16:59information for your own benefit, for your own direction, and for your
- 17:02own increase and understanding. And so when you go back to the example of
- 17:06being a manager and things being very directive, I remember those days as
- 17:10well. That was the way you got things done, was you told people what to
- 17:13do, and they did it. When you started getting the ideas that, well, you should
- 17:16try to work with people to have them set their own goals and objectives, to
- 17:19have them figure out what's important in their job, to have them figure out what
- 17:23they need to learn. Because then it's them that came up with these suggestions,
- 17:27not you. So they can't really say, well, Yvonne made me do this, and I'm
- 17:30not really into it. Mhmm. They said, hey. I kinda came up with this as
- 17:33something I should work on. It's gonna be hard for me to go back to
- 17:36Yvonne and say, hey. Change your mind. I don't really think I should be working
- 17:38on that anymore, or I better have a good reason for it. So I think
- 17:41it's a way more powerful way to manage and to do your
- 17:45business. Well, you know, getting back to to your business,
- 17:49I think, you know, the whole purpose
- 17:52for those of us that are in a service business
- 17:56is to help people transform in some
- 18:00way, either transform themselves, transform their business,
- 18:03whatever, which requires change, which usually
- 18:07requires additional information. But I think,
- 18:11you know you know that one of my favorite quotes is,
- 18:15you know, if you want a gooey brownie, you don't want the recipe. You know,
- 18:18if you walked into a bakery store and you want the gooey brownie and they
- 18:22said, okay. Here's 2 cups of flour. Here's some cocoa. You know?
- 18:26That would really turn you off. And yet, in terms of us engaging,
- 18:29and I'm not even you know, which some people call sales,
- 18:33engaging with potential clients, that's exactly what we
- 18:37do. We say, I'm gonna give you 2 cups of flour and, you know,
- 18:40quarter cup of cocoa and, you know, do you've got do you
- 18:44have an oven already? Do you, you know? And, you know, the
- 18:48process is so long when in fact what they want is
- 18:51the gooey brownie, you know. In the in the end, you're probably gonna teach them
- 18:55how to make it, but, initially, you're you're That's the key. That's
- 18:59it. If if you if I'm motivated by the gooey brownie
- 19:02and I go in and I eat it 5 or 6 times and I pay
- 19:06you $10 every time I go and buy a gooey brownie from you, pretty soon
- 19:09I start to get motivated to figure out how to do this myself because I
- 19:12really like these things, and I could be saving $10 every time. So I think
- 19:16over and over and over again, when you're presented
- 19:19with the outcome that you were looking for, the result that you
- 19:23want, it leads to you wanting to learn how to do it. And that's really
- 19:26you know, I mentioned Kathy Sierra earlier. That's really one of the things that she
- 19:30pushes really hard is that once people can do successfully
- 19:33what they set out to do, they will take the time to learn what are
- 19:37the elements that go into doing that repeatedly and reliably over and over
- 19:41again. And so they will learn the elements that you wanna teach them. But if
- 19:44you teach them just the elements at first and they are not yet being
- 19:48successful at what they wanted to do, it's discouraging. They still
- 19:51can't snowboard. They still can't do this. They're still learning to do it,
- 19:55and it's discouraging. And I'm I wanna I wanna kinda make this
- 19:59just to me, relevant to me. I mean, there are certain marketing
- 20:03buzzwords that have always turned me off because I didn't get
- 20:06it. I mean, it's no matter how many times people tried to
- 20:10explain it to me, I didn't get it. And, you know, the benefits of
- 20:14your service was always something that is, like, I don't know what the benefits
- 20:17are. You know, you do know, but but in that
- 20:21framework, maybe not. And so that to me, when
- 20:25I say you want the gooey brownie, that I get.
- 20:30Do you know? This is you know, so when I'm talking to my clients, I
- 20:33can say, are you tired of this? Do you want
- 20:37this? You know? If you said to me, list the benefits, I would
- 20:41be stuck like a deer in in the headlights. And I
- 20:44think that's, you know, the other thing is that one
- 20:48size does not fit all. There's so many different variables to
- 20:52every situation. People need to feel confident
- 20:56enough that they can tweak and
- 20:59adjust. You know, and, you know, I talk about
- 21:03situational awareness, which I thought was a great phrase. But when I
- 21:06looked it up, it turned out that somebody else had already invented it.
- 21:11It was actually for for first responders and military people you need to
- 21:14be aware of your surroundings to stay safe. Right? But the
- 21:18same is true of us as as business owners.
- 21:22If you have a fire in an ashtray, you don't call the fire department.
- 21:27You know? You have to be aware of what you're doing. So if you need
- 21:30to make a small change in your business, you don't
- 21:34necessarily need to pull out the big guns and change everything. And I and I
- 21:38I think even when I was managing, one of the things I always hated
- 21:42was you got a new person on top, and they changed
- 21:45everything without taking the time to say, what works?
- 21:50Right. Right. What's working here? What if you know? And
- 21:54it used to be like, oh my you know, I remember when I would
- 21:58became a district manager, one of the people walked in and she goes, you're the
- 22:016th district manager that I've been through. So Yeah. I'm
- 22:05not really paying you any attention. I was like, gosh.
- 22:10I mean, people have common set you know, people have common set if
- 22:14you don't That's the thing that strikes me most about, you know, I mentioned
- 22:18Ernesto Cirroli. His education in this whole thing was going into
- 22:22Africa as a young idealistic, save the
- 22:25world teenager, early 20 something, and trying to help a
- 22:29group of people to plant tomatoes in a very verdant area of
- 22:32Zambia or something like that. And his story in short
- 22:36form of his story is they planted everything. They got amazing tomatoes
- 22:40better than anything he'd ever seen in Italy. He was so amazed and so impressed,
- 22:43and he couldn't understand why the local people hadn't done this a 1000000 times over
- 22:46because it was so obvious it was a great place. And he woke up one
- 22:49day and the whole tomato field was smashed down, eaten, destroyed,
- 22:53whatever. And he said, what happened? They all said, what what happened? And the local
- 22:57people said, well, of course, the hippos came through last night, ate and destroyed
- 23:00everything. That's why we don't plant tomatoes there.
- 23:05Alright. Before we we you know, like I said, our problem is gonna be to
- 23:08stay focused and stay within time. So just
- 23:12a couple of action steps that you think people can take
- 23:16and talk about the free gift that you're gonna give. Okay. Action steps
- 23:20I think that you can take are I'm gonna come back to being curious. I
- 23:23think if you try to gain an understanding
- 23:27of the things around you that may be beneficial to you to your
- 23:30business by talking to other people, I think that's a benefit. And why
- 23:34we are so energized, I think, about All For
- 23:38One is I think a belief that we have and share that the
- 23:41collective wisdom of a group of entrepreneurs coming together and
- 23:45sharing ideas and experience, maybe incomplete experience, maybe
- 23:49incomplete ideas, is more valuable to me as an entrepreneur
- 23:53than some guru trying to teach me their system that work for them under a
- 23:56certain set of circumstances, which I can't relate to. Yada yada
- 24:00yada. So the idea that you can surround yourself with a group of
- 24:03people who are willing to help, are willing to exchange their ideas for
- 24:07yours, and exchange for your ideas to help them, and are willing to make
- 24:11your path to success much better is a really, really good
- 24:14strong way to go. There's a lot of knowledge in the collection of
- 24:18people who are trying to do business together. So find yourself a community like
- 24:22that would be my first step. The second step is find a way
- 24:26to attract people to you, and this is where the flip book idea comes
- 24:29in. We work a little bit around in a model of
- 24:33attracting people to you and then engaging them in what it is that you're
- 24:37doing and building a relationship with them over time. Not so much a
- 24:41transaction, a sale, but on a transaction to or
- 24:44a transformation to them saying, this person knows a lot or this person
- 24:48had a lot of interesting ideas or resources. I wanna stay connected to
- 24:52them. I can't see what I need to buy from them today, but I don't
- 24:55wanna lose this relationship. It's too valuable to me. And so a flip
- 24:59book can be a really good way to gain attention. We had somebody early on
- 25:03when we were doing this say to us, you know, you tell me you have
- 25:05a 25 minute video. I look at it. I say, I don't have time to
- 25:08watch a 25 minute video. I'm busy. I won't I'll I'll look at it later.
- 25:11You give me a flip book. I love the way you broke that video
- 25:15down into all these little things. I was flipping the pages I'm going through, and
- 25:19we go back and look at how long did they spend going through the flip
- 25:22book, and they spent 45 minutes going through the flip book. Why?
- 25:26Because they were in control. It felt like everything was going at their pace. They
- 25:29knew when they could stop. They could keep going. So they did have the time,
- 25:33but it didn't feel like they were making the time because they were engaged and
- 25:36involved in it. So one of the things that we're offering is a is an
- 25:40introductory portion of a course that we have on creating flipbooks
- 25:44that will show you how flipbooks are a simple technology that's
- 25:47overlooked and that can be used in order to attract
- 25:51people to your offer, to your ideas in a way that engages them and involves
- 25:54them. And you talked earlier about kinesthetic aspects of
- 25:58learning. That's one of the things that got me about flipbooks.
- 26:02I've been in video for a long time. I have a radio and television arts
- 26:05degree originally. That's my background. And I was used to saying to people,
- 26:08here's a video. It's very engaging. And they would sit and watch it for 5
- 26:11minutes. And if they were if we were lucky, they stayed awake. They didn't drift
- 26:15off during that. We put that same content into a flip book, and now
- 26:18there are other things they can click there to find more information. They turn the
- 26:21page every time they go to the next piece of information. They're physically
- 26:25involved in moving the learning forward instead of just sitting there
- 26:29passively having it flow over them. So we're gonna provide a link to you so
- 26:32that you can come and take that free introductory program that shows you a little
- 26:35bit about how this can be an amazingly effective, attractive,
- 26:39piece for what you're doing, and it's relatively easy to learn. And we do have
- 26:43options and courses to help you to build those or to build them yourself, or
- 26:46we can help you to build them. Lots of different ways we can go, but
- 26:49we're just interested in getting you a way to get to your audience in a
- 26:52way that's different, unique, and engages them for longer. Because we
- 26:56know that the biggest challenge most entrepreneurs have is not selling to
- 26:59people, but finding the time to get the conversation to the point where they
- 27:03can share what they could do for them. If you can get people's attention and
- 27:06have a conversation, many entrepreneurs are excellent at finding
- 27:10relationships that turn into business. But it's getting that attention that's so
- 27:14critical. So that's the couple of things along that line.
- 27:18I have to tell you, even though I know about flipbooks, I'm
- 27:22in. I am definitely in. So So let me ask
- 27:26you the quick question before we end up. And that
- 27:29is the the $1,000,000 question is, when was the last time you
- 27:33did something for the first time? I
- 27:37I think just earlier this morning. No. I I
- 27:41I I am a small business entrepreneur, so I am constantly doing things for
- 27:45the first time. And it's been actually really interesting. I've been working with a colleague
- 27:48of mine, who has been a lifelong manager in an education
- 27:52department, worked inside a fairly conservative organization for a long time. And he's
- 27:56now gone out and he's hung out his own shingle, and he's doing some consulting
- 27:59work. And it's been really fun to to to talk to him and to
- 28:03work with him because he's learning about the possibility of doing
- 28:07things he's never done before and feeling like so
- 28:10here's where that community of people comes together again. I could I could give
- 28:14you a half dozen examples over the last couple of weeks where I've taken
- 28:18on something that we're going to do as an organization that I have
- 28:22no idea how we're going to do it. What I do know is I know
- 28:26people like you. I know people like Rob. I know people in the offer one
- 28:29community. I know people in the other communities. And amongst those people
- 28:33are the answers I need to be able to do this. And if not, I
- 28:36can always go to some place like Fiverr or Upwork or someplace, and I can
- 28:40hire somebody who has the expertise that we don't have at a relatively good rate
- 28:44to do it. So I almost never say I can't do that. I
- 28:48always try to do it on my own. I always try to figure out what
- 28:51I can, and then I go and get the help that I need from other
- 28:53people, and I let them fill in the gaps. So I think I do something
- 28:57new and different every day. And and I love that attitude. I
- 29:01love that attitude. Alright. I am sorry, but we're gonna have to wind this up.
- 29:05And so for those of you that are listening, make sure that you subscribe,
- 29:09share, and engage with the podcast. You can find the previous
- 29:12podcast, you know, and listen to them. We've had some great
- 29:16guests. And it's my way of giving back to the community and helping
- 29:20you fuel your quest for growth and and impact. So I
- 29:23hope you will continue to join me for one small change and see, you
- 29:27know, what kind of small shifts we can have that will yield
- 29:30monumental transformations. And I wanna make sure that,
- 29:34you know, you dive into your world with your bold vision and
- 29:38innovative possibilities. So, Dave, real fast, what's
- 29:42your your last word? What's your take, you know, that you wanna leave us
- 29:46with? My take is I I'm gonna go back to be curious. I think we
- 29:49developed that really well. Be curious about what's around you. Be curious about the opportunities
- 29:53that exist in your day to day life. As Ernesto Saro
- 29:56says, shut up and listen. Keep listening until you really understand
- 30:00what the circumstances, what the person is trying to accomplish, and how you might
- 30:04be able to help them to get there. Or as Alan Alda said, until you're
- 30:08changed by what you're hearing. That is a true
- 30:12means of reaching success, I think, for small business people.
- 30:17This is fabulous. I wish we had more time. Thank
- 30:21you. Always talking to you is one of the best
- 30:24times of my week. So I wanna remind my audience,
- 30:28you know, that remember change is simple but it's not always easy. And
- 30:32it requires courage, resilience, and a willingness to step outside your
- 30:35comfort zone. So make sure that you join me again for the one small change,
- 30:39again, as we embark on this journey of a bold vision and innovative
- 30:43possibilities. And I will see you on the
- 30:46next One Small Change podcast, and
- 30:50I hope you will listen to more. Thank you so much, Dave, for coming
- 30:54and sharing My pleasure. Thank you for your help. Wisdom.