Technology Learning and Leadership | An Expert Panel on Thriving in the Digital Age

Technology, learning and leadership, an expert panel on thriving in the digital age. It’s a very special edition of Biz Bites where we have three visionary experts sharing their insights on navigating what is today’s very complex technological landscape. We have a learning specialist in Jd. We have also a spiritual coach in Cheryl, and we also have tech leader Dave, joining us to reveal powerful strategies for continuous growth.

Authentic leadership and leveraging technology for success. You’re gonna discover some practical approaches to daily learning, the secrets of intrinsic motivation, and how to balance digital tools with human connection. Whether you’re an established thought leader or aspiring to be one, this conversation is one that is gonna transform how you approach growth and innovation in our rapidly evolving world.

Welcome to Biz Bites. Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of Biz Bites proudly brought to you by CommTogether, the People Behind Podcast done for you because we are all about exposing other people’s brilliance. Don’t forget to subscribe to Biz Bites and Check Out Podcast done for you as well in the show notes.

Now let’s get into it.

Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of Biz Bites, and we have another panel discussion today from a group of thought leaders. And I say thought leaders because we are coming from all different areas. We’re gonna get everyone to introduce themselves in just a moment, and also to give you a little bit of an insight as to where they’re coming from, how they see.

The market at the moment, the climate that is out there. It’s a very interesting time in the world right now. So I’m gonna throw to each of our panelists, we’re gonna start off with Jd. Welcome to the program. Thanks Anthony. Greatly appreciate you having me here today. It’s a pleasure to be on. My name is Jd Walter.

I’m the president of tric. We are a small learning and development company. We focus on human skills developments and organizations looking to achieve peak performance. A couple words to describe the market today. Crazy. I think it’s high volatility, constant change. I. Yeah, I can see that it is crazy is a good word at the moment, isn’t it?

Cheryl, what about you? Do you wanna introduce yourself first of all? Yes. Thank you. It really is an honor and a privilege to be here. Thank you so much for that. I am Cheryl Stet and I’m a spiritual coach, a master healer, a three time author, and I help people who are feeling stuck in their lives lost.

They know they’re meant for more and they just. They really lack clarity. So I help them discover that clarity within themselves and step into who they truly are. And yes, crazy. And what I see and what my clients see and I just see this more and more every day actually is people who can really make a difference.

All those change makers are really being called. To step up and move to a whole new level to do what we can do. Yeah, I can absolutely see that. And I think that’s a really important point, and we’re gonna come back to that in a moment. But first of all, Dave, why don’t you give us your words in a bit of an introduction as well, Anthony, thanks for having me on.

Really appreciate being here. Honored to be among these other thought leaders. I’m Dave Alton. I’m the CTO of a managed service provider here. In the United States we help businesses protect themselves from cybersecurity threats and do it for a lot of small companies. And I would say how I would describe the market right now is, it’s just wild. It’s so all over the place. It’s really hard to keep up and keep track of everything that’s going on. And I echo a lot of what Jd and Cheryl have said. I think it’s an interesting starting point and I think it’s interesting too for me, I mean I’m based in Australia, as listeners will know, but the three of you clearly based in the United States where crazy is probably the word that Australians might subscribe to when they, where they’ve been watching the news in the last few months. But I don’t think it’s just about the politics. I think the politics is not something we need to get too much into, but rather it’s about everything else that’s going on, isn’t it? Dave just coming back to you for a moment.

Technology is a big player in the crazy and wild that’s going on at the moment, isn’t it? Because it’s moving so quickly. Yeah. Not only is it moving quickly but we have seen such a transformative time with AI and, augmenting humans’ abilities to do what they do day in, day out. That I think, I’ve always been in the IT industry for way longer than I care to admit, and it’s always moved fast.

But these last four years have just, they’ve been. Cyclonic right to just, everything is like rotating around and moving and moving and it’s, there’s, it doesn’t ever feel like there’s a break and then you add the global, trade everything else on top of it. It just makes everything a lot more chaotic.

Yeah, chaos is an interesting one and we’ve discussed that on the Biz Bites program in the past. But I think there’s some chaos being deliberately created at the moment in and in many ways. And I think, she coming back to you. How do people, I. Navigate through that. It’s such a difficult such a difficult time when things are not happening as where you would hope that it would happen at a steady, slow space pace, I should say.

It’s all over the shop. So how do you cope? How do you cope? It’s such a great question. And number one, don’t get bogged down in Warrior fear. Because so much of what’s going on stirs up fear in individuals, and that’s a low vibration. We’re not gonna be living our lives well, we are not helping ourselves evolve and grow and expand into, human, into humans, into what we all have the potential to really.

Become so noticing when you’re in fear and seeing how you can really move into a higher vibration of feeling empowered what can you do? And so that can mean, going to a yoga class, if that feels right or riding your bike or connecting with a loved one, looking into someone’s eyes. It’s also looking at yourself looking inward and saying, what is it that I can do?

Because we are all made of energy and we are all radiating what and who we are and where we’re at all the time. So talk about chaos in a mix of things. We have all these humans and everything is energy. And so how do you really want to be in the world and what is your contribution? Big or small, we can all make a difference.

And so taking that place of empowerment and making decisions for yourself in a positive way, yeah it’s a tough one, isn’t it? Because on one hand you wanna be making decisions for yourself. On the other hand, if you’re a leader, you need to be making decisions for other people as well. And finding that balance at the moment that’s challenging.

Yes and no. It’s really making that. Commitment. I, I just got off a call a little while ago with a woman and another woman this morning that I did a session with and I just see how, specifically how they’re being called. So I do chakra readings, I do readings on people.

I can see their energy and even when we’re doing something for ourself. For ourselves, it affects the greater whole. It affects those around us. So I can see where people are blocked and I can let them know what they can do about that and how they can move into their superpowers. And the superpowers are the light, are the energetics.

So I’m not talking so much at the level of the mind or what we can do. Physically, but helping ourselves evolves, it sorta evolve. It’s like putting the oxygen mask on yourself first before you go to help someone else. So it’s up to me to do my personal work every day so that I can best serve my clients to help them do their work with their clients, and that ripples out in the world.

And when I get bogged down in fear and trust me. It happens, I’ll sink and and I’ll, and I have lots of skills to get myself out of that. But then to reflect and look at a situation, what is this? Reflecting back to me to understand what I can do and don’t we all feel better when we believe we’re making a difference, that it builds confidence.

It, we encourage ourselves then to do more, especially when we start to see results. Absolutely. Jd, it’s a good opportunity to bring you in here because making a difference to other people is essentially what learning and delivering of learning is about, right? Yeah. I think I. So I think there’s two things that both Dave and Cheryl said, as a segue into what does learning really do for us, right?

There’s the world outside of us and there’s all the things that are going on. There’s in, in each of our little ecosystems, there’s our job, there’s our personal, our home life. There’s all the things that we’re involved in socially, and each of those have their own dynamics and interpretations of these externalities.

So I, I think, I don’t wanna, I talk about learning and development from an organizational perspective, but I’m really interested in learning from an individual human perspective, right? Like, how do we help individuals find, Cheryl’s talking about, find that center right? Find that ideal vision for themselves, and then chart a course to that.

Then how do we align all of these things in our lives so that we’re being purposeful and intentional as we go forward? The organizational return on investment for learning is enfold, right? Fill in the blank. It’s huge. Employee engagement, which is just an employee’s emotional connection to this thing that they’re doing, is, at all time lows, stress is an all time high.

Extreme stress is skyrocketing. Managers are the, probably the one group that are under the most amount of duress in the workforce. And learning and development isn’t just about training a skill set so we can perform our job. It’s really about how do we optimize ourselves as human beings so we can achieve peak performance.

I talk about it very specifically in an organizational context. When I’m talking to an organization, a potential customer, we’re talking about how do we meet business objectives? How do we overcome a dip in the market? How do we overcome competition in a market space? And that has to do with productivity and performance.

But you can’t just throw more people at it and deference to Dave, you can’t just throw technology at it either. And I don’t think, Dave, that’s probably what you would argue. But you can’t just throw these things that we’ve been throwing at this challenge traditionally and expect that the, they’re going to net any kind of a result.

We live in a world right now where volatility. Is the norm there? I talked to a state trooper in New Jersey one day and he said There’s no such thing as a routine traffic stop. And I ruminated on this idea of routine, and I realized that there’s no routine anywhere. It’s not just for tactical athletes, those first responders or trauma ward surgeons.

There’s no routine for anybody anymore. And I, that’s the hardest thing. How do we build habits in a world where there is no routine? We have to become the routine. And Cheryl, I think you’re driving, I don’t wanna put words in anybody’s mouth, but I really felt like we were going down this path where we’re just about to hit this part where this is about creating the normalcy for ourselves and not trying to adapt ourselves to whatever the world’s norm is at the particular moment.

So social norms are something that we want to, div abide potentially, or, ignore, but do so deliberately in either regard. But the normalcy will come from ourselves. And that is that kind of alignment between what is the ideal vision that we have for ourselves and what are we realizing in our day-to-day right now?

Dave, I’m gonna come back to you in a minute about the technology side of things, but Cheryl, just to pick up on that point, how easy is it for people to find that sense of self amongst the chaos and the crazy at the moment and to, to, to work out? Particularly even in terms of, learning new things.

It’s, that’s a difficult thing for a lot of people to accept that they need to and to actually. Find their space about what is right for them to learn and how to learn, and I think it’s such a crucial point because I believe it’s a human need. Learning and development is a human need. It’s, and so many of us, so many people get to a place of stagnation and historically that’s what retirement was all about.

Become stagnant. You’re done, you hit the age of 65 is what it used to be, and you’re gonna retire and get your social security. I’m actually Canadian, so your Canadian pension, whatever it is. But to recognize the need to learn, no matter what happens in learning and development, you’re gonna grow.

You’re, and we are all meant to evolve. There’s no plant out there. Think of the plant, anything in the natural world, the trees, even crystals, everything grows. Everything grows. The plant doesn’t go. Yeah. Okay. I’m done. I’m just gonna sit here and if it does, if it’s not getting nourished. It’s going to die.

So we must nourish ourselves, whether that’s through books, listening to podcasts, going inward and finding our own truth. So it, your learning can be multifaceted, but the number one thing is. To make sure you’re learning. And yes, there’s time to integrate What we learned, that’s part of the developmental stage is the integration.

And in our culture today, I think way too much emphasis is placed on a external learning. If we go back to the truth or at least the truth for me, that all the answers are inside me. So I don’t tell my clients what’s true for them. It’s just if I’m going to learn, like you’re saying, Jd you want to empower your students, those that are coming to you.

And even in it, everything is, you want to empower them to find the answers. That’s the empowerment of learning. It’s not, I traveled in many countries and in Africa, all those kids, they only learn through memorization. Just see how much you can stick in there and hold. And that’s the learning, it’s teaching to think for the self, but it’s we all have the opportunity in this lifetime and it’s intentional and it is required that we continue to learn.

My grandmother used to say that, and I’m no spring chicken here, folks. She used to say, Cheryl, you’re always learning. Don’t stop. If you stop, you might as well be dead. And so I think it’s something that has been forgotten in many ways, and that it’s, I think of it as a human need.

It’s required. Yeah, I think Dave bringing you in here, I think that picking up on that point, I think we don’t have much choice sometimes when it, particularly when it comes to technology and business, there’s a lot of pressure to learn new things. And I was sitting yesterday afternoon learning new things about a CRM that I’ve had for a little while and didn’t realize all of these things that it could do that I’d like it to be able to do.

And it’s. You don’t sit and think about it as learning often, but the truth is, it is. And we are, but there is a lot of pressure to do that, particularly on the technology side. Yeah. I mean we as a technologist and sometimes I call myself a solutionist ’cause I’m always out solving problems. Sometimes I think we overcomplicate things too.

I have had many a client come to me and say, Hey. Find me the magic bullet that does this, and the answer is it’s that pen and paper that you have sitting there like I, I can build this really cool tech thing that will. Do all that stuff you said, but it’s gonna cost you a million dollars and then it’s gonna take me two and a half years to get it done.

That pen and paper that’ll take care of it right now. You don’t have to wait, you don’t have to wait and pay for it. And Cheryl, I love what you’re saying about learning. ’cause it, I actually I try and set aside. Just 15 minutes a day to learn something new. And it doesn’t really matter what it is.

Like I, sometimes it’s silliness sometimes it’s technical, sometimes it’s how to listen better. It’s so important to my routine to have that little tiny bit of. I get to learn something new. And I think when we dedicate ourselves to that, when we dedicate to, Hey, we’re always learning and we’re really always committed to that.

I think things open up to us that, wouldn’t have before. And I know I, I mentioned AI when we started talking and I know that’s the buzzword and everybody’s it’s all over the place, but. It really has been something that I’ve used as a tool to point me in the right direction of things, because I don’t know everything about tech.

I don’t know everything about life and I surely don’t know everything about myself. But AI has given me inroads into things I would’ve never looked at before. Is just a tool, just like the. A pen and a piece of paper is you can use it to get better at stuff and learn new things and really capitalize on the world of information that is out there that there’s no way humanly possible to go and learn all of that, right?

You have to find some way to filter it and. I have found that AI is a good way to do that but there’s a lot of other cool new tools to do that with as well. And some of it is just like what we’re doing here, right? Having conversations with people. I love getting on these panel discussions and I’ll jot little notes down other panels will say, man, I’ve never heard that before.

I gotta go check that out. And connecting with people. So it’s, I don’t think there’s any one way to do this and there’s definitely not a right way to do it. I think there’s a right way for you. I think the one thing that we’re missing is that accountability of taking that on, right?

I think too often we put a lot of blame out there. Oh, the world’s terrible because so and so did this, or so and so did that, and. I take the attitude of it’s all my fault. Everything in the world is my fault. Because if I do, then I have some power to do something with that. If I say, oh, it’s somebody else’s fault, then it’s all on them and I and they have all the power to, to fix and change and do whatever.

But if I say, Hey, that’s on me. I can do something to make that better. I get all that power back and then I do, I get into a learning mode or I find new balance in my life and things like that. I’m Cheryl, I love what you’re saying about learning. It’s awesome.

And I think it’s a good cue also to bring back Jd into this discussion because I’m intrigued as well about. The different ways people are learning and it, Dave talked about being deliberate in doing something every day. And I don’t know if everyone puts a label on it and does that every day, but I think it’s hard pressed to find a day when you’re not learning these at this time with so much going on.

But I. I’m interested as well in terms of the kind of learning that you are delivering. How many different ways do you have to deliver the same thing? Because not everyone learns in the same way. And in this day and age, there’s so many opportunities to learn in different ways. So is that something that businesses have to accommodate as well?

Yeah, I think there’s, so two things I would, I kind of wanna jump on here. The first is this idea of continuous learning, right? The individual drive to grow. I. That shows up in organizations. I see it time and time again. We, I have a lot of conversations about rewards and recognition in organizations.

Unfortunately the organizations wanna default to the easy, right? So they grab something off the shelf and they say, here’s our wellness group, or, which has value but isn’t. The development that people are necessarily looking for. What they really want are opportunities to expand, stretch themselves inside of this job that they’re doing to demonstrate that they have value beyond their particular job description at this point in time and showcase what they can do for an organization in the future.

So more times than not, this is interesting because I think to Cheryl and Dave’s point. Everybody does wanna learn. Everybody does want to grow. That’s a natural instinct inside of us as human beings, propagation of species. The only way we continue to evolve as a species is if each one of us individually does our part to.

Push that foot forward. So I think inside of organizations, what you’re seeing is people are starting to step up and say, my growth is not just training. It’s not just this class that you wanna put me in. It’s give me that project, give me that high profile, quick turnaround project that everybody’s gonna be looking on.

I wanna see if I can do it. I want stretch myself. That, that feeds into something that Dave said and it strikes me. Is autonomy. What people want on the job more and more is they’re looking for this technology to relieve them of the mundane so that they become more, more critical thinkers, more strategists, more of the leadership stuff, more about the human element of working together in an organization.

Productivity is productivity and we’ll always get the work done, but we’re looking for is ways to bring more to the table. I don’t wanna just come in and stamp out widgets all day long. I want to think about the assembly line and I wanna make a contribution. To refining it. I wanna say something about this process that I’m involved in, and that I think is a growing trend across all workforces, that workers are looking for more opportunities to be.

Autonomous to be able to take risks, to be able to make decisions, and then to be celebrated when those things fail as much as they are when they succeed. So the challenge to organizations is really structural and maybe policy driven. Are our employees being given those opportunities, our managers allowed to make those kind of decisions.

So I think that’s what organizations are probably wrestling with more. Than the learning itself. When it comes to the learning itself, the one thing I would say is that it’s not styles of learning. There’s a lot of research out now that suggests, there really isn’t any style of learning that we are.

That’s necessarily baked in. What we take away from that is that the best, and this has always been the philosophy, the best learning opportunity mixes everything, right? You’re bringing in all the different pieces. So when I build a pro a learning opportunity, I focus on human skills, so I focus on human interaction.

I don’t do e-learning, I don’t like self-paced because of the subject matter. If you’re asking somebody to change human behavior, they have to be in an environment where somebody is modeling that. So a workshop for us is typically, we do some kind of an assessment at the front end, right? We have a little bit of an interaction.

So there’s this baseline understanding of where we’re showing up on a particular scale of behaviors, leader, leadership, emotional intelligence, et cetera. Our workshops have some lecture, of course, with lots of small group discussions. We want peer-to-peer interaction. They, we want everyone in our workshops to get comfortable collaborating.

So it’s a skillset. I don’t have to teach it, but we can implement it in every one of our workshops. We do a lot of scenario based role playing so that there is an opportunity to practice. So we try and identify right behaviors. We define those right behaviors, we give them some ness of their own, and then we talk about ’em and we talk about how we experience ’em.

We talk about how they show up. We start to model them. We start pointing at each other and saying, I think that’s mostly it. Nope, that missed it. That kind of interaction is what takes all of our learners to this collective point where we now we understand what the desired behavior is. Fill in the blank of what it is.

And they’re able to move forward with it. They have a language now, they can talk to each other about it. They’ve got some coaching on the backside, so whether it’s one-on-one or small group, we can come back and we can continue to help them individually or collectively develop along those action plans.

So to your question, I think I don’t think, I don’t put a lot of stock on learning styles. I do understand everybody has a preference for how they want to intake information and how much time they need to digest that information, contextualize it, and then get ready to have the conversation. So that’s the part of the train the scenario.

I like small groups too. I don’t, too many people in the room. You really can’t give that kind of attention to folks. So it’s really about letting them express themselves and show up in their authentic way, and then accommodating that. And so somebody needs a pause and needs to take longer to think through stuff.

I’m very adept at like reading the room. I drag my heels when I’m necessary ’cause I want somebody to catch up or I want to give them. I can see somebody when they’re ready to jump in. They’re just trying to get their thoughts together. I wanna make sure we don’t miss that opportunity. So the learning environment, I think the facilitator led interactive sessions, performance-based stuff that we do.

It’s much more accommodating to preferences, whether we call ’em styles or preferences, but it’s much more accommodating. To the individual learner. An online course is an online course. All four of us could take it. We’re all gonna experience it differently. The level of knowledge that we take away from it is gonna be different in our acumen, in performing whatever the thing is that we’re supposed to perform at the end will be varied.

Not that anybody will better or worse, it’s just we all have a different experience with it, and so we really want to get the most out of the learning experience. I always advocate for. Put more time and energy into the interaction, into a, experiential learning and see the dividends pay off. I think too many companies is a closing thought.

Too many organizations run out. They buy an LMS, there’s a bunch of content in there, and then they throw it out there and say, take whatever you want, but just don’t do it during working hours. First of all, this is part of the job, so pay me for it. It should training, learning and development should always be done within work hours.

If you want ’em to do it, you better pay ’em for it. But it’s in context too, and that gets lost when I have to go do something after hours. It’s not in the context of work anymore. So it loses that sort of gravitas that it should have. Yeah. I’ll pause there. No, look I love you made some really amazing points there and I wanna pick up on, on three particular words that you talked about in the course of that was collaboration, relationships, and also experiences.

And I think they all talk together and I think that’s such an important aspect of. What we need to do to be able to learn and to improve ourselves. And ultimately, if we want to be thought leaders in our spaces, then we need to constantly be working on those things. Dave, that, particularly in the technology space, people focus so much on the actual tech, but those other elements are really what’s critical to making that work.

Yeah, and I, the whole idea of. Learning is so interesting to me because I, I think about, how I learned this and it wasn’t like I didn’t read a book. It was like 1984 and there was no such thing as internets and things like that. I just, you fiddled around with stuff and you found something that worked and you did it, and then you did it again, and then it didn’t work that time and it was.

It was very incremental and I’m sure people of know of, agile kind of methodology around project management and things like that and it’s, I think it’s a really good, just way to think about life is that everything we do is incremental. All of it. It’s all incremental learning because everything builds on everything else.

I’m sure Cheryl could talk about how, once you understand your kind of spiritual journey and how connect with your energies and things like that. Once you understand that, then you can go to the next level and you can take it further and I think all learning is.

Is based around that. And we see that in, in tech. We see that in, life, in being a thought leader. Like I, I see a lot of people trying to be a thought leader. Like you don’t, there is, that doesn’t exist that you’re, you just are, you aren’t, and you aren’t, Andre, not, you’re not a thought leader because you’re.

Trying to be like, all you have to do is say you’re a thought leader, like that that, the minute you recognize that I am that. You are that, and you get to start doing that stuff now. Are you perfect at it? Are you always going to be the, the smartest guy in the room? I would argue if you’re the smartest guy in the room, you’re in the wrong room.

You should never be the smartest guy or person in the room. You should always want to look at another person and go, what can I learn from them? How and how can I make a difference? That person’s life. And I think if we did more of that just in general for the world would be a far better place than it is maybe at this very moment in time.

So I think continuing to learn how to interact, collaborate, be part of. This thing called life instead of worried about what label we give it or how we’re perceived or what other people think about it, or any of that kind of nonsense that, that get, that feeds into that fear, uncertainty, and doubt, right?

Let that stuff go because it really isn’t going to make a difference day in, day out at the end of all this. I don’t want to be remembered as a guy that was scared of everything. I wanna be remembered as this guy that, made a difference in somebody else’s life. And whether that’s just my son who’s 14 and playing baseball and is having the time of his life, or, my staff that works with me or my clients.

I, I am here to make a difference. In whatever way I can. And a lot of times that’s technology ’cause I’m really good at that. But a lot of times it’s just listening. Just be paying attention and being present is such a lost art. Like I have to keep talking to my 14-year-old son. Look, put the phone down.

I know you think that is your world right now. And to some degree he’s not wrong, but. Put the phone down like it, you don’t need to doom scroll for four hours and pretend like you’re having a conversation with your wife. It doesn’t really work out all that well, tr trust me, I’ve done it.

Yes, I, and it is, it’s that, it’s interesting, isn’t it? Because we were all brought up with this idea. Multitasking just doesn’t work. You’re not really doing this a whole bunch of things at once. You’re only doing one thing and not really paying attention to the others.

And yet we have a generation that are focused on, even the simple act of watching tv. When was the last time someone sat down in front of the TV and didn’t have their phone in their hand and were, looking, scrolling through emails or looking at things on social media. As well as what’s on the show.

And did you see that scene? Yes, I saw it. No, you didn’t really see that. And was it critical? It’s, it’s just nobody is sitting there and just paying attention anymore. It’s not something that we are teaching people. And I think having that, coming back to you Cheryl, and having that stillness and that ability to reach inside and then to you, you look at the impact that you can make on other people, that’s a learning skill within itself these days that seems to get neglected.

And what we’re doing with all our learning. I’m listening to you and Jd and everything that you’re doing and what you’re helping your people with. Everyone that comes to your trainings that you are personally involved with, you have developed. The neuropathways in your brain. That’s all energy moving certain ways, and you’re helping people learn how to collaborate at high levels and receive the information and all of that to help them develop the neuropathways.

And Dave, how long have you been learning something for 15 minutes a day? You’ve got that neuro pathway nailed, right? And you’re, um. You’re doing so much in the world with it, or maybe you’ve really strongly developed that neuro pathway of figuring things out as a way of learning, whatever it is.

I believe that everything is here for our learning relationships. We don’t get married with the how to map and there are how to maps, but we don’t, there’s no. Cookie cutter, how to map really for anything, whether it’s friendships, marriages father, daughter, son, relationship. All of those relationships and the relationship with the self.

So it used to be, psychology used to really believe that there were in our early development, that there were certain things that were permanent. Our brains that were developed in certain ways, and we have dec, we have discovered that is no longer true, that because of the brain’s neuroplasticity, we can learn anything.

We can change how we think, we can change how we look at the world. And so when we look at, learning is a need. Learning is fundamental. And if we look at life in that way, look at the relationship, we can have the neuro pathway of, oh, it’s his fault, it’s her fault. I did nothing wrong. And that’s the easy road, but to neuro pathway of, oh, it’s his fault.

Oh, what do we always like, like Dave modeled for us. For what? It’s Greg. Braden gave a wonderful talk on, AI and said that science has now proven that we can duplicate anything. We’re making lamb wounds, we’re giving birth to lambs out of artificial wounds, and we’re practicing on the humans.

The lamb wounds are legal. And we could put chips in our brains to make us learn better, learn faster, that actually adjust. But the one we cannot duplicate is source energy, chi the vital force, God, what, whatever you wanna call it, that will never happen. It’s impossible. And science has proven that we can’t do that.

And so the learning is so much more complex. Than what we see as everything that’s available and that every bit that we learn and grow in the way we think we’re growing. Sometimes we grow a certain way and we look back 10 years later and go, oh, what was I thinking that was, it’s still learning.

It’s still learning. And like you said, Dave, we can make mistakes. It’s all okay and keep going with it. But I think it’s just the idea of living from a place of learning helps me grow and evolve and develop myself and helps others indirectly and directly, and that’s what’s gonna make our world different.

It’s not, yes, we can look at what I had a spiritual teacher once say, whenever we see that something is really outta place and it just eats away at us. It’s ours to do. It’s ours to do. Like Dave’s nodding his head, he is owning that one. Oh yeah, I hear you. It’s ours to do. So take action. Even if you mess up, even if you mess up, you’re learning in that way.

Anthony, can I jump in here for a second? I just wanna kind of foot stomp something here, and I think Dave’s bringing it up and Cheryl’s bringing it up and probably both did a better job, but I think there’s this there. And Cheryl, I love where you’re going with this, right? And I think Dave you’ve hit on this without saying it right.

What drives us has to be internal, right? There’s a misuse of the word motivation. How do I motivate them? Sorry. You can’t, don’t even try. Motivation’s intrinsic. I got, that’s mine. You can in, you can try and influence my behaviors potentially, or my thought processes, but you can’t motivate me. Only I can do that.

And I think, part of the challenge of the world today is there’s so much noise, there’s so much competition for our attention. There’s so much information being thrown at us. Every day. I turn around and AI is going to fill in the blank of the new greatest thing and we’re going to Mars.

And it’s just all these crazy way out there things. And I think they’re all abstractions. And I don’t spend, personally, I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about moon travel. ’cause I just don’t care. I don’t even care about Mo Mars travel. I wanna travel to the beach, right? I want something that’s like tactile and within the realm of mine.

Because I think that’s where we start to see what Cheryl just said. That’s where we have those moments. We can only live in the, we say this from a government perspective, right? Citizens can only experience government at the local level because it’s the only place that it’s actually physical, right?

We drive on the roads, we see the water come through the faucet, we watch the sheriff drive down the street. Anything beyond that is an abstraction and it’s hard to get our heads around it. So I think there’s all this demand for our time and our attention these days and the things that we’re supposed to learn.

I wanna go back to Cheryl’s point though, but if you find that internal driver. That motivator to Dave’s point to learn and grow and to be the best version of you that you can be, then the opportunity to make those significant contributions become available to you. ’cause if you’re distracted by everything that’s out there, that’s all you’re ever doing is you’re looking down the road, you’re trying to find this place to fit in.

And it’s I live in southwest Florida, and so for anybody in the US you know what driving in Florida is like on the interstate. It’s like trying to merge onto 75 the interstate during rush hour. You better be doing 90 or you’re gonna get run off the road, right? Because everybody’s moving so quickly and that’s what feels like it.

It feels like every time somebody says we should, and they point off there in the distance. I can’t get my head around it. It’s a abstraction. It’s too far removed from me. I can’t do anything about that. There’s too much competition. But if I reframe my thinking, I actually can influence it. But I have to start right here.

I have to be, to Dave’s point, I need to model what I believe is right behavior, and I’m not gonna tell people I’m doing it. There’s an old zen cone riddle, right? And it’s a student in the master top of the mountain. They’re sitting there meditating. Student says to the master, master, what do we do when we achieve enlightenment?

And the master says, go home. Just go. Go back to your lives, citizens. And I think there’s a lot of this baked into what we’re talking about today. There is learning. There’s learning and growing because I want to be the best version of me that I can be so I can make my contribution to the species.

That’s my piece of evolution, right? That’s my piece of moving the species forward. So I just wanna foot stomp that idea that there’s, that it’s these internal drivers that we really ought to be focusing on and not the external. Manipulation to be whatever somebody else says we should do or want to be.

I love that. And I know we’ve gotta wrap things up in a moment, but I just wanna bring Cheryl and Dave back in here for, to, to finish things up. How important is it in this day and age to. Take all of those things on board that Jd was just talking about, and also have that, drive yourself to be able to stand out, particularly in an age where in many respects, technology is leveling the playing field.

So being able to stand out should be an internal motivation, shouldn’t it? Cheryl? It. It absolutely should be. And if you don’t feel that within you, you need to find it. It’s what’s getting in your way. And there’s some kind of block in your energy system. It’s as simple as that. It’s like a plugged drain, a plugged plumbing pipe.

There’s something in there. That’s what I do. I help people discover what that is, that’s getting in their way so they can learn more about the truth of their being and what they’re really here to do. So they can actually, then you’re motivated. Then you have your passion. I. That’s what motivation is.

That’s, it’s your passion. Without it, you’re just coasting and like you say Jd, about all the noise out there I just can’t be involved in that. I can easily get on the highway and do 90, that’s not a problem. I’ve learned, I’m from Canada, we don’t do that there, but I’ve learned how to do it here and I make it fun.

But it really is. Finding that within yourself. And we all came here to find that. We all came here to find our passion and what’s ours to do. And that’s high level energy. And you can’t know where it will all go. You don’t until you do it. It’s an energy flow. So if you’re feeling stagnant if you’re trying to go by what someone else says you should do you’re not gonna find it.

You’re gonna stay stuck. So it’s learning about yourself, finding out what’s in your way, and it’s all conditioning. We’ve all been conditioned and we keep conditioning each other, and it’s releasing that and discovering what’s true, learning about what’s really true for you, and then going after it.

That’s, that is a really great way to wrap things up. But Dave, I just want to give you the final say on here because I love what you’ve said because you’ve come through, we started talking off about crazy in the beginning, but really what we’ve talked about here is a way that you can motivate yourself to see through.

All of that dis, even whether it’s the technology or outside of technology it’s bringing it all together and taking control of that and being able to stand out. Yeah. I love the word balance in these discussions because it really does take, it takes all of it, right? You there isn’t, life isn’t.

Compartmentalize, like we like to think it is, right? It’s holistic, right? It’s everything. It’s all the relationships, it’s all the interactions. It’s all the experiences. It’s all of it all at the same time. And JdA, you made a great point about noise. You have to learn what’s noise and what isn’t.

When you do things start to balance out and things start to happen the way they need to happen. Until you do, you listen to the noise and you’re distracted and you’re not on your, you’re not on your right path, right Cheryl? You’re on whatever everybody else says your path is. If you really want to be on your path, you have to filter the noise, find what’s true for you.

Find that balance and then go after it and be accountable to it. Right? Be accountable to yourself. That I am doing the absolute best that I can in this situation. And sometimes it’s still not gonna be fun. It’s still gonna be awful. And we all have had those, but that’s what others in this life are for.

It’s about connections. And when it’s shared, it’s so much easier than. When you have to have the entire weight of the world on your shoulders. What a great way to wrap things up. I think there’s so much in this discussion that we’ve had. I think we all could have kept talking for a lot longer about all of this.

It’s a terrific topic of conversation and I think, going from crazy to how we can learn and motivate ourselves and the idea of collaboration and relationship building is so important. So thank you all for being a part of the panel discussion on the Biz Bites for Thought Leaders Program.

We really appreciate all of your insights. And of course we will include details on how to get in contact with each of our panelists in the show notes. But for now, thank you each of you for being part of the program. And thank you everyone for listening in. We hope to have your company next time on Leaders.

Hey, thanks for listening to Biz Bites. We hope you enjoyed the program. Don’t forget to hit subscribe so you never miss an episode. Biz Bites is proudly brought to you by podcast done for you, the service where we will deliver a podcast for you and expose your brilliance. To the world. Contact us today for more information, details in the show notes.

We look forward to your company next time on biz.

Hey, thanks for listening to Biz Bites. We hope you enjoyed the program. Don’t forget to hit subscribe so you never miss an episode. Biz Bites is proudly brought to you by podcast done for you, the service where we will deliver a podcast for you and expose your brilliance. To the world. Contact us today for more information, details in the show notes.

We look forward to your company next time on Biz Bites.

Hey, thanks for listening to Biz Bites. We hope you enjoyed the program. Don’t forget to hit subscribe so you never miss an episode. Biz Bites is proudly brought to you by podcast done for you, the service where we will deliver a podcast for you and expose your brilliance. To the world. Contact us today for more information, details in the show notes.

We look forward to your company next time on Biz Bites.