Let’s Talk About Learning and Compliance!

Curt Anderson  00:02

Hey, Damon, good afternoon, good morning. Happy Monday, happy Martin Luther King, day, how are you, dude? I’m doing great, Curt and ready to go for the week. How was your weekend doing? Alright. Just fine. Yes, just fine. Lots of football, lots of football, alright. So lots of football, lots of excitement, lots of new things, man, we have the one, the only, my dear friend, my bestie, my partner. We might have to talk about onions, my onion, freedom fighter, right? We do? We do. So I’ve got Dr Julia in the house. Dr Julia, happy Monday. How are you today?

Julia Phelan  00:36

I am great. How are you I

Curt Anderson  00:39

am? Do I? I honestly cannot be any better at this very moment. There’s nowhere else I’d rather be at this time than having a delightful conversation with you. It’s been a little while since we connected, and so let’s start here. You, hands down, in my humble opinion, have the best business name on the planet, Damon and so dr Julia, could you please share To Eleven Can you please share where did To Eleven come from?

Julia Phelan  01:08

I can. And thank you. I appreciate that. It’s that there’s a movie that. And you know, as you get older, you start to realize that certain movies you know like more and more people like I don’t know that, but hopefully people know it. But there’s a movie called, This Is Spinal Tap that came out, I don’t even know, probably in the I don’t even know when it came out, but it, it’s a sort of a parody of a documentary following a band around the country and and so one of the one of the one of the the scenes in it, they’re talking about music, and they’re talking about amps. And one of the guys is talking about, like, well, you know, what do you do when you want to, like, you know, make it better and louder. And you have to see the movie to really appreciate it. I don’t always do it justice. But he’s like, Well, you know, well, we take it up to 11. He’s like, Well, isn’t 10 the highest one? And he’s like, yeah, no, but I we made it like we made it one higher on our thing. And so when my business partner and I were thinking about our company and starting it maybe seven or eight years ago, we thought, well, we want to have something that really demonstrates that we want to go above and beyond, and we want to take it up a notch, you know. So it’s, this is good, but you know, 11 is even better. And in the movie, the guy’s like, Well, why don’t you just make, you know, like, make 10 louder. And he’s like, Well, no, I want to go one one up. Yes.

Damon Pistulka  02:27

Oh, that’s hilarious part in that movie. It’s,

Curt Anderson  02:31

yeah. So if you’re not familiar with it, you have to google Spinal Tap the To Eleven scene. It is brilliant. I love and, and the guy’s like, No, you can’t, like, it’s to eleven and it’s to eleven So, right, absolutely brilliant. Just love that scene. So, Julia, you and I had the honor and privilege. I had the honor and privilege of meeting you in person couple years, several years ago now, and we got together. We were part of a collective networking group, mastermind group, if you will, and just fierce marketers, solopreneurs, just trying to make the world a better place. So speaking of that, this wonderful name that you have for this company, brilliant name, To Eleven, share with folks. How do you and your partner make the world a better place? How do

Julia Phelan  03:15

we well, you know, our real mission is to I spent a lot of years in doing educational research at UCLA, and maybe for about 20 years, believe it or not, I was doing that. And what I started to realize, once I was working with coaches and other people who you know are in the non academic universe was, there’s a whole bunch of stuff that we know about, about best practices of teaching and learning that tends to stay somewhat siloed over here in the in the, you know, ivory towers of educational institutions like UCLA and others, when it could really be useful and helpful and beneficial to other people who are working in, you know, corporations or in other industries where people are learning every day, all the time, about all sorts of things. And so I am really passionate about taking all these lessons and all these things that we know about good, good teaching and learning practices and figuring out, how can we implement them in real world, corporate or other types of contexts, so we can help people benefit from all of that collective knowledge and wisdom, which oftentimes they don’t, and it’s nobody’s fault. I mean, there’s no finger pointing going on there, right that you don’t, if you’ve never been exposed to something, or you haven’t had that opportunity to really understand or learn those things, why would you know them? But oftentimes, within companies, we have people in learning and development who are amazing, but yeah, they’ve been maybe promoted up through the ranks of human resources or some other. A track, and many times they have amazing instincts and natural tendencies to do things. But there’s oftentimes a whole bunch of other stuff that we can, we can bring to them to say, hey, you know, here are some ways that you can make your learning experiences or learning environments more effective and more efficient. And so why wouldn’t you want to do that? So that’s that’s really how I hope to make the world a better place. Well,

Curt Anderson  05:26

beautiful answer. And so, again, you have your PhD from UCLA. You actually were professor at UCLA 20 years

Julia Phelan  05:34

professor. I was a researcher, researcher like a research scientist, yeah,

Curt Anderson  05:38

well, research scientist for 20 years and so. And then slid into the entrepreneurial world and helping folks. What do you I want to go back in time, and then we’re going to dive into some strategies that people can apply to their workplace leadership tips. I’m super excited to dive into this. Why do you How did you pursue your passion with being, like, kind of a chief learning officer, or like, just really helping people to elevate their learning, helping folks like that. What really drove that passion?

Julia Phelan  06:05

Well, it really was, I mean, I mean, I don’t want to repeat myself, but I think it’s maybe a similar answer to the one who’s escaped, but I think that I started to when I started to interact more with people who are outside my typical sphere that I was living in. You know, when you work in an educational environment, you’re really in a pretty homogeneous situation. And when I started, you know, when I joined the Doris resident, I recognized expert group, and I started meeting all sorts of different people from all sorts of different walks of life. And I think a lot of it was during the pandemic where we started having more and more of this type of, you know, interaction with people across the country, across the world. And I’m having conversations with people that in a day to day, my day to day life I wouldn’t probably be bumping into and I think we all experienced that. But I started just to really realize in having just, you know, sometimes just casual conversations with people like you, that I’d be talking about what I do, and they’d be like, Oh, wow. I didn’t even know that. Wow. I’ve never even heard of that. Oh, I didn’t even know people did that. And we’re also sort of insulated in some cases, where we imagine that everybody knows what we know, and everybody is, you know, walking in around, and that’s with that same knowledge and expertise. And it’s only when you broaden your horizons a little bit and start interacting with people who are outside of that that you really start to see, oh no, no, that’s not the case. And so I saw this, in a way, a golden opportunity to help people in other contexts, to leverage some of these things that I see as somewhat second nature, because I’ve been working in that wall for so long.

Damon Pistulka  07:58

Yeah, I can imagine there’s just a tremendous amount of things in the educational space, that when you move out into traditional business, that it’s, it’s like, you know, apples and, you know, nectarines, because oranges aren’t even close, right? You know, because it’s the the whole, I don’t know we were talking about this a little bit before we got on, you know, the learning itself, how to learn, the process, all that kind of thing, I think, is largely overlooked in business. And it’s like, oh, here, you know, digest all this stuff and you’ll be fine. And we don’t think about how people learn. We don’t think about, you know, how long it takes. We don’t. There’s just so many things that we don’t consider, yeah,

Julia Phelan  08:46

and it’s interesting. Damon, I was thinking recently about, if think about first day of school, particularly if you’re a student who, you know, has moved around over, sorry, has moved around over, to different schools at different times of the year, so the new kid who’s starting school in February or something, right? And that’s just a very stressful, you know, potentially difficult situation for a lot of people. And it’s really exactly the same thing as starting a new job, right? That there’s all those same things you have to be thinking about, like you starting a new job. You’re like, Okay, I’m wondering, do I fit in here? Are there other people here, like me? Do I even know what to do? Do I know where, yeah, the bathroom is, or where I have to go get lunch, or all these things. And anytime that we have stuff in our head that is kind of overwhelming us or distracting us, or is not really meant to you. If I’m in my math class and I’m thinking all these things like, Oh my God, this teacher doesn’t even like me, or I didn’t even know what they’re doing. I don’t even have a book in front of me, and all these things you can’t then learn anything, right? And so it’s exactly the same situation in a in a in a company. Or a business context, but we don’t tend to make that connection. And that’s really what my work is about. Is about helping people see that. You know, we’ve all been to school and had those types of experiences, most of us, unless we were lucky, never had a never had people really telling us the best ways to study and the best ways to learn things, because unfortunately, in our society, we tend to hope and imagine that people will just absorb that from the atmosphere. But if you have been lucky enough to have somebody help explain to you or what are the best ways to learn, even if you know that we’re not always applying those things in different contexts, and in many cases, we don’t really know that, and we’ve just kind of been brute forcing our way through it our whole life. And so to think about these things in a more intentional and thoughtful way is, I think, really important, and we can take these lessons learned from other, you know, the traditional educational context and apply them to all sorts of other areas.

Curt Anderson  11:07

Well, I love, I love the term brute force, because, as you’re talking, I’m like, I’m going back in time. Damon, oh yeah. I like, I am embarrassed. Like, you know, I had an E com business, and I’m thinking, like, I had, like, no onboarding process. It was just like I had to get our orders out the door. I can only imagine, like, the position that I put folks in, just in, like, my selfish state of mind of, like, just get her done, get her done. Get her done. And so Julie, for small business owners out there, entrepreneurs, you know, we target, you know, we speak a lot of manufacturers. We’re there to traditionally, you know, 510, 2050, employees. What? What’s like a starting point we’re going to dive into, you know, like some of these learning strategies and even going into compliance. But what are some first steps that folks could, you know, to have that environment more inviting for folks that are learning something new?

Julia Phelan  11:58

You mean, from the from the business owner perspective, yeah, yeah. I think a key thing, and it’s always hard to figure out, you know, is there one most important thing or one most important consideration? But I think one of the really important things is when you you as a business owner, when you’re dealing with all these day to day things, and you’ve got this deep expertise and experience, and you are hiring in people to help you solve problems that you’ve been thinking about and dealing with for years, and you have to put yourself into the mindset of The new person who has none of that background, none of that experience, none of that context. And it’s really, really critical for you to think, Okay, what was it like for me when I didn’t know any of this stuff? And it’s really difficult for us as we develop expertise, to get back into that mindset, because we’ve we’ve grown, and we’ve developed, and we so as you grow in your expertise, you develop competence. And we oftentimes, I’ll show people a graph, and you kind of go up and you end up in this space where it’s like unconscious competence. So you don’t really even know all the stuff that you know you start when you first start out, you’re painfully aware of, like, everything you don’t know. You’re like, Oh my goodness. But as you grow you you start to develop competence. But then the ultimate point you get to is you don’t really know what you don’t know. So then when you have new people coming in, it’s really easy for you to, you know, skip over things, not give them enough directions, you know, just completely ignore really important stuff and not tell them, and they’re just kind of sitting there, like, what? Like, what am I doing? Are you using acronyms that they don’t understand? And you’re all all manner of things like that. But that’s a huge mistake that people often make, is assumptions that other people know what they know. And it’s not easy to get yourself back into the mindset of a novice. And we’ve all done things like, you know, taught our kids how to drive or or taught somebody. We’ve tried to teach somebody else something that in which you have deep expertise. It’s really difficult because you you can’t really remember all the steps, because, you know, when you drive your car, you just do it somewhat automatically. You know, you go from point A to point B. You’re not thinking, Okay, now I’m going to put my foot on the brake. Now I’m going to do this. You just kind of do it. And when you’re teaching someone that you’ve got to completely, like, turn back time, right? And remember, what was it feel like to think, Oh, my goodness, like, I didn’t even know, like, you know, how far do I need to stop and all of this, just the different things that you need to do so that, that, I think, is a huge thing when you are dealing with new people, or you’re having new people come in and help you, like in your organization, that you have to model their world and really. Trying to remember that they don’t have the expertise and experience that you have, and so you have to do some things to help them, help scaffold some of that event.

15:11

Yeah, I

Curt Anderson  15:12

absolutely love that. So hey, we got a couple people. Somebody saying hello, Damon. So we’ve got Senna saying, Great session. We’ve got uzman. And so uzman says, greetings, we’ve got. MD, hey guys, happy Monday. Thank you for stopping by. You’re out there. Drop us a note, let us know that you’re here at the familiar with Doctor Julia on LinkedIn. Man, she has great content, wonderful stories that she puts out there. Julie, let’s slide into we were talking a little bit about ethics and compliance. Let’s go on. I’m going to dive in there. How? How is this? How is this applicable for our learning strategies? Yeah,

Julia Phelan  15:45

so, I mean, I think when we think about ethics and compliance, they are big, big, big, important topics and important things, important considerations for many different organizations. And so when we think about learning, we may be in an organization, we may want to teach our new employees how to give feedback, how to receive feedback, or, you know, this whole manner of different things that might be good skills or practices. You want to teach them when it when it comes to compliance type issues, it’s even more important for us to be teaching in the right way, because oftentimes the ramifications of not following some sort of rule and not complying to certain rules or regulations can be really difficult. And again, we need to take a step back. And it doesn’t really matter what we’re teaching people, but there are some fundamental things that we need to always be considering when we’re teaching people stuff. You know, one of them is, we have to meet people where they are. We have to understand what do they already know, and how can we connect the new stuff to that? I mean, that’s really the fundamental thing. So one of my kids went to he was working in a supermarket, and he was 16 years old, working as your bagger at the supermarket. And he came home one day and he said, this summer job. And he came home and he said, Oh, we was we were doing the training, you know that mandatory training you have to do. And I said, Simon, of course, I’m interested in it from many perspectives, right? So I asked him, Well, what was it like? And he said, Well, you know, he said it was, it was all about workplace harassment or something like that. And he said, but the focus of it was, oh, you know, when you go to a conference, make sure you don’t, you know, I don’t know, drink too much, or make sure you don’t do this and do that. Well, he’s a 16 year old kid. He’s not going to a conference for Ralph’s supermarket. And so, yeah, immediately it just kind of goes right over its head. So I mean, this speaks to not just prior knowledge, but really, you know, relevance, right? What’s the, what’s the reason that someone is going to be learning something? And so you need to know why something is important, how it fits in with what you already know. But also you know. How is it relevant to you? And so if we, if we really want to reach these 16 year old kids, we got to figure out, what are the what are the types of situation that they might find themselves in, in in the supermarket or some other world, and how can we present them with some examples so they can understand? I see this would be a bad thing to do, obviously, because I’m a good human, I’m not going to be doing it. But also there are some reasons why. And so I think that with we think about compliance in particular, and content that’s around that, that oftentimes the impact of not doing something well or correct or right is going to be bad, and so we need to pay even more attention to how can we make sure that people learn these things? And we were talking earlier, before the show, about things like this is a simple example, but relevant. You go on an airplane and you watch over and over and over again the flight attendant telling you the emergency drill, and telling you where the life jackets are, and telling you on some flights, you know, there’s a life boat, if it’s a big enough like international flight, all the different protocols and procedures. But if you haven’t actually done it, and you haven’t actually put the life jacket on, and you haven’t actually had to look and figure out where is it? Is it under your seat? Is it between your seat? Is it somewhere else that in a moment of extreme stress and panic, it’s likely that very few of us would actually be able to do that, even if we’ve seen it hundreds and hundreds of hundreds of times. So when we think about teaching people about compliance topics, we have to be thinking, okay, how can we help a both connected to what they know, make it relevant to them, help them understand why it’s important, and, you know, also give them some time and opportunities to practice it and to you know, be you know, we’ve all done fire drills. School or, you know, within our company or hotels, they do them sometimes. But, and that’s a great it was a great practice, but we need to be doing that with all sorts of other other topics as well, other practices, not just, you know, fire drills, yeah.

Damon Pistulka  20:14

And I think for where Curt and I are at in with a lot of manufacturers, there are so much danger, so much opportunity to be hurt by equipment, and even when, and in previous life, when I did some work in the oil fields, I mean, when you talk about safety, safety, safety is so critical, and you talk about compliance, right? And everything down to the types of shoes you wear, the clothes you put on, the the way you walk, almost in some of these situation, makes a difference for compliance and and like you said, great example about your son. If I’m someone new on the job, how do I have to be taught at that level? Or if I’ve been on the job for 20 years, I almost think that the 20 year person is harder because they get so comfortable. Because I’ve seen people moving things that are tons, tons, 1020 tons, moving it around and forget that it is 10 or 20 tons, and crush things, and thankfully not people. But it’s just we get this level of comfort because we’re doing something all the time, like you said, just like learning we understand. But in manufacturing, it’s so easy to work around very dangerous things and get comfortable, and when we can be comfortable, yeah, yeah.

Julia Phelan  21:37

And I love that example too, Damon, because I remember doing a study once back at UCLA where we were helping teachers develop some new practices, and we had teachers with all levels of experience, so some brand new teachers and some veteran, 20 plus year teachers. And I remember thinking, Well, my initial thought was, oh, well, I bet the the veteran teachers will be better at this, but no, for exactly the same reason that you say that, that the veteran teachers were so kind of stuck in their ways, or so confident in what they’d been doing for all these years, and it was really second nature. They weren’t really interested in in any new strategies or techniques that might have been useful, whereas the ones who had less experience were a little bit more open to that and open to receiving it. So some and I think the other thing too, when it comes to having a lot of expertise is just like we have to meet people, new people, where they are, we also have to meet the experienced people where they are. We cannot be, you know, giving people the same thing every single year, because then they just zone out, right? So if you’ll say, Okay, well, our industry is telling us that every two years we have to give such and such a training. Okay, then you got to make sure that, how can you, you know, have some element of refresher for folks who maybe haven’t seen something. But also, how can you, you know, bring them up a little bit more to the next level and not just have them see the same thing? Because as soon as they see that, their eyes glaze over, they’re not paying attention, and they may just as well have not been there. So it’s, it’s, you anytime you’re teaching someone something you want to make it as effective and efficient as possible. I mean, that’s really the point. And doing that means you’ve got to kind of turn the camera around and think, Okay, what do I really need to be thinking about in this context? What are the variables? What are the factors that are going to influence whether or not people are going to learn what I want them to learn, or they’re not. And then, once we think about that, we can work on improving it. But we have to think about that context first,

Curt Anderson  23:48

yeah, and it’s, gosh, you guys are making such great points. And the thing is that, like, if you don’t have critical mass, or, you know, a major corporation where, you know, we’ve had the the budgets and the bandwidth, and we can make this either fun or entertaining, or, like, somehow make, you know, elevate the engagement where, you know, we’re like, Hey, I’ve 20 employees, and I’m doing my best, you know, like, what’s, you know, any tips, or, I don’t put you on the spot, but any tips or suggestions for, like, the small company, I like exactly what you’re saying, Damon, I’m thinking of, like, multiple I just saw a guy at the gym yesterday, and he changed careers. He got out of manufacturing because, like, he was dealing with, it was a small manufacturer as a client of mine, years and years and years ago, and they had, like, really hot, hot parts, and it somehow, it slipped down into his glove, and, like, he got severely burnt on his arm. He’s, like, man, like, you know, very conscientious guy did everything safe. And, you know, still had, like, a pretty severe situation. He changed careers because of it, you know, so for, like, smaller companies. Julia, do you have any tips suggestions like, how do we, how do we keep that small crowd engaged, whether the newbie or the long term? Any any tips there? Yeah, well,

Julia Phelan  24:55

I think that I might, I might come at this from a. Slightly different perspective, because I think you mentioned something about, okay, if you’re a small company, you don’t have a big budget, and you can’t make things fun and cool. And I think that oftentimes we swing too far into that territory, and we chase the shiny thing, you know, and so we’re always thinking about like, oh, everybody’s telling us we have to do, you know, Tiktok videos, or everyone’s telling us that we have to do this or that to teach people things. And you know, my, my philosophy is on that that okay, let’s always begin with, what do you want to teach someone? And you know, who is the person that you’re teaching it to, or who’s the group that you’re teaching it to but begin with, what is it that you want to get them to understand? And this is where all of that you know, prior knowledge stuff comes in, because it really is. There’s never going to be a Oh, it’s always best to use video. It’s always best to use this or it’s always best to use this strategy, oftentimes the most effective learning strategies are really simple, you know. And so if you are a small organization, you know, it’s not a it’s not going to be a deficiency, you know, it’s probably oftentimes going to be more effective because you’re going to have to be maybe a little bit more creative and innovative, and innovative, or you’re just going to think, okay, you know, this is the thing that I need to teach somebody, you know, some other organization might have some shiny video, but actually, it might just be the best strategy to have everyone gather around your, you know, bench and show them something. And so I always caution people against, you know, thinking that, you know, technology or some kind of innovative thing is going to be the answer, because it really isn’t. It just going to depend, like, if, if you have somebody who has expertise in, you know, auto mechanics or something like that, then you want to introduce them to a new tool, or, I don’t know, clearly, I do not have expertise in this area, so, but yeah, some new, new thing that if they already have a lot of expertise, then the way that you need to teach them is you can just say, hey, Damon, you know, you know that drill that you usually use for such and such a thing? Well, there’s this cool new one. It’s just like that, but it’s got this different widget, and that’s it, right? You don’t need to go into any deep thing, but if you’re going to teach me about that, you’re going to have to use a whole different strategy, right? But the reason that you’re doing that is because I don’t have any foundational understanding or knowledge about that, whereas Damon does, so your strategy is going to be different. And so I think that you know, when you’re any size organization, what you really need to think about is, what is the stuff that you want people to learn, and how can you do that the most effective and efficient way, you know, given that you want to make sure that people are, you know, motivated to do it, and they’re, you know, paying attention to you, and they feel like it’s relevant, and They have time and opportunity to practice whatever it is that you’re helping them do. But we don’t ever want the the shiny technology to come first, because that’s always a mistake,

Damon Pistulka  28:12

yeah. Well, what talking about that in shiny technology? I mean, one of the things, and this was years ago already, that we learned about safety and manufacturing was we went off to Dupont, actually, as one. I don’t know if they still do, but at the time, they were making a lot of explosives and other things that are very dangerous. So their safety record was phenomenal in the practices they had to use. And we went out and and studied it, and did their their courses, and implemented in our and the the the biggest factor to improving safety in a manufacturing plant is making sure that people will walk up to someone else and ask them, Hey, are you sure that safe that’s the only thing because, Because, and talking about it every day, and making sure that we’re all thinking about every day, because we will get into our own thing, and we’re gonna. Doesn’t matter what we’re doing at home. We need we were doing something around the home and, well, I just got, I have to move this so I pick it up. Next thing you know, I’ve hurt my back, or I’ve hurt something else because I wasn’t thinking about it, but, but in a setting like an industrial setting, other people, you’re working around people most of the time, people all around and keeping your eyes open and going, Hey, Damon, you sure you want to do that? Or can I help you with that? Or do we need go? Need to get the right, you know, tool to do that, or something else, because it’s a huge and I saw it take safety and go from, you know, on a scale like 75 80% reduction in in recordable work injuries, just because people are thinking about and talking about it. And these are very experienced people like you said, if you don’t do something a little bit differently, they’re just going to look at the training and go, Oh. It’s, yeah, I’ve seen this before, and then they’re thinking about lunch, yeah, yeah.

Julia Phelan  30:05

I love that Damon, and I think it’s a perfect example of we can pick that. We could strip away the manufacturing context, context, and you could put it in any other area, because what you’re really talking about is you want people to feel comfortable in, you know, making a mistake, and it’s not going to, not going to be punished for it. You want people to feel comfortable in, you know, it’s essentially like asking questions or pointing out to somebody or that, that it’s that the culture has been developed as such that if someone says to you, like, hey, Damon, you know, I think that, you know, that looks like it’s too heavy for one person to live. Let’s, let’s help you that that becomes just normalized, you know, that type of situation, and there’s not, you know, I worked on some training for a company once, all around safety, around like things like ladders, and like OSHA compliance and things. And, you know, one of the things that, you know, people would do sometimes it was like, Oh well, they have these competitions and like, you know, let’s not have any. Like, how many days can we have without an accident? You know, those kind of things. But if you if you frame that in such a way that it makes people not want to report things or not want to do that. Yeah, then all of a sudden, you don’t really have no accidents. You’ve just got nothing that’s actually been reported or brought up. But if you, if you flip that around and think, Okay, well, you what you really want is, if there is an incident or something that happens, you do want people to be able to report that and feel comfortable because maybe there’s some other, you know, context or other situation in the environment that is leading people to have that accident or leading that unsafe practice. And so if people are aware of it, they might be like, Oh, my goodness, we don’t realize we didn’t have the right size ladder for this thing, or, you know, whatever it might be. And so it’s really that that is, that issue you’re talking about is about developing this context in which you know mistakes and and you know any kind of thing like that, is it’s okay and it’s normalized, and it’s not, you’re not going to be in trouble if someone points it out to you. And it’s, it’s huge in any context, because if I feel if you’re studying for a test or something, if you feel like afraid to ask somebody, because you think you’re going to feel bad, because they’re going to think like, what an idiot you are, you don’t know this, then you’re not going to ask, and you’re not going to try and get help, and you’re not going to try and Improve, because you don’t feel comfortable in doing that.

Curt Anderson  32:42

Yeah, so And Julia, I love the line that you said, you know, begin with the end in mind. You know, it goes back to, like the Stephen Covey seven habits. And so I love what you’re saying. So regardless of size, think of the outcome that you want. You know, and I think you know again, I’ll go back to my previous life. My mistake was not understanding or realizing the more successful that person is, more successful the company, the whole you know can be. So I love what you’re saying. There I want to go. Here is it is said, or it was told me that when you know, when you get goosebumps, like, you’re just working with a client and just like, Man, I just, I feel like I’m in a zone, and you’re like, you kind of get those goosebumps. Like, this is really resonating. It’s really hitting home, and you see a wonderful deliverable or a wonderful result. Could you share with us, what are those moments for you? What are like, those goosebumps, moments where you just feel like, Man, I’m just, you know, I know you’re, you’re, you’re from across the pond. I’m going to throw a baseball analogy, when you just feel like you’re hitting a home run with a client, and you just see that result in that outcome. What’s an example? Or what does that look like for you? Well,

Julia Phelan  33:47

the first thing that came into my mind was, and this is less about me and more about somebody else, but I’ll say it anyway, that I was working on a big project for a utility company, a Water and Power Company, and the the company has a training facility where they have a lot of folks who have here been worked their way up the ranks, and are now training the new folks. And this is training people who are going to be the water utility workers. It’s a very entry level type job. It’s a lot of digging holes and for pipes and stuff. And so when I first was up there, I was thinking to myself, and falling victim to this expert blind spot issue. I was thinking, well, how hard could that be? Like digging a hole or doing these things like and so I was doing a lot of observation and watching these different folks teaching these new and I’m going to say guys, because I think it was all guys, but, but then I was interviewing these different trainers. And so one of the things that I was thinking about. It was all these folks are exactly the folks I was talking about at the beginning, that they’re really expert. They have a ton of experience, but they’ve never really had any, you know, direct instruction or help in thinking about, how would you teach a new person how to do this? And so when I was interviewing them, what what I was just struck by and really, it made me smile, and gave me some goosebumps. I’ll say is, I was talking with one of the guys, and he’s and I was saying, Well, how do you, you know, when you’re talking about, you know, holding different tools and stuff, like, I mean, how, like, what do you? How do you, how are you doing that? And, and a lot of the other guys have just kind of given me these basic answers. And he said, he said, Here’s what I do. I said I had this guy the other day, and he was holding the whatever tool it was in this kind of awkward way. And I was asking him about his hobbies, and he said he was a drummer. And I said, Okay, well, how do you hold your drumsticks? Like, think about that, you know, and I don’t really know about drumming, but he and so the guy was kind of then, like, holding this wrench, or whatever tool it was like, in this way that he and he said, Okay, so when you think about these tools, don’t be like, you know, like, like this, like, ripping it so hard. Like, think about, how is it that you hold your drumsticks and it’s a lot softer and kind of, and he was, and then he said to me, he’s like, so I just want to, I want to connect what I’m teaching him to something that he already knows that it was like, wow, like that. Yes, as I said earlier, that’s one of the fundamental things. And here he is just spontaneously saying, like that was his instinct to do that. And it was so great to hear so many stories like that from these guys that they really did have really good ideas, and it’s almost like they had just stumbled upon them. And what was fun for me was then I could tell them, like, yeah, all these things you’re doing, they’re all great. And then even once, I could tell them that it allowed them to, in a more intentional way, do that more in the future, because it was almost a happy accident that they were doing it in the first place. But then when I could say, yeah, that is really useful for this reason, then it just, you know, kind of takes off. So that’s just fun to see things like that. So

Curt Anderson  37:10

when you and I met, I so I absolutely love that. So when you and I met, you were talking about, we were talking about, before we went on, I took just pages of notes. I was just, it was like a master class. I just loved every minute of it. And if I’m not mistaken, you taught me there might be a myth like, so most people learn like, you’re either a visual learner or you’re like, what are the alternatives? Right? Like, like, that’s an

Julia Phelan  37:31

esthetic or auditory or whatever. Yes, no, it

Curt Anderson  37:35

drives you crazy. Just like, so let’s like, right here and now, because how many times, well, I’m a visual, I’m a such a squash

Julia Phelan  37:42

that myth.

Curt Anderson  37:44

Yes, yes. Just walk us. So why do that? Will you please do it? We’ll

Julia Phelan  37:49

do a speed round of that. Yes. So we hear that all the time. People are always talking about that. And so the reason it’s bad, so first of all, it’s not true, right? For the and I already gave an example of this, right? If you’re teaching Damon about the new drill, you don’t need to show him a video. You don’t need to draw him a diagram. You could just tell him, because he already has expertise for me, I don’t know anything. Yes, you need to sit down and give me a video. Yes, you need to hold my hand and show me how to do it. That’s not because I’m a visual learner and Damon is a different kind of learner. It’s because we’ve got something different in our head, right? So if you, you know, bump into somebody in the street and they ask you for directions, and if they’re if they’ve never been to your town before, then you need to say, okay, you’ve gotta, you could draw them a map, and you could point out some landmarks and stuff. And so you’d, they’d need, they’d need something, because they wouldn’t be able to hold all those directions in there. Directions in their head. They’d need a queue of some kind. Whereas, if it was you bump into Damon and he lives in your town, and he’s like, Hey, Curt, where’s the new coffee shop? You’re like, oh, yeah, it’s right by where blockbuster used to be, or something like, that’s that’s all you need to say, right? And again, that’s not because he’s a different kind of learner than I am. Is because he has more prior knowledge in his head. And the reason it’s really damaging for this myth to kind of persist is that a it can really discourage a growth mindset. Because if I’ve been told or I believe that I am a visual learner or something. Then if somebody wants to teach me, I don’t know, dancing or something, I might think, all right, well, I guess I can’t do that unless I have some, you know, video or some visual medium or or if I, if I think that I, if I, if someone says, Oh, you’re not a math person, or, you know, any of those types of things, right? That it’s really damaging to our motivation to learn and grow, because we’ve we, in a way, turn off that tap before we’ve even tried it right. And so when we, when we put try and put people into these different buckets, we really, really, really are doing people a disservice, because we are in a. Way, kind of just telling people, yeah, don’t even try that, because it’s not for you, or don’t even try that. That’s you’re not that kind of person. And, you know, why would you ever want to do that? Yeah? So when we think about teaching people things and learning, we’ve got to a it’s difficult, right? We when we’re learning anything, my, you know, Curt, my mantra is, learning is hard, right? Learning is hard. That’s okay, yeah, but again, we don’t ever want people to imagine that they can pick up a guitar and learn how to play it in an hour, right? And if someone tells you that, then no. But if we can help people to understand that, yes, it’s going to take some time and effort to learn and practice and get better at something, okay, and it’s worth it. And, you know, the the way that it’s going to work for you? Yeah, we might have preferences, just like, you know, I don’t like onions, and some people might, right, but that we have, we certainly have preferences for, you know, some people like to use e readers, and some people don’t. But that doesn’t mean, right, that that preference has anything to do with that efficacy of how that how something is going to get into your head. That really has to do with what you already know, how motivated you are, and all these other things, versus someone telling you, yeah, you’re a kinesthetic learner. So you’re going to have to learn math by, you know, jumping around the room or something and acting it out.

Curt Anderson  41:26

Well, I want to, I want to tie that in with the gentleman. The reason I asked that, we’ve talked about that before, the I wanted to ask that because I love the example you gave with the gentleman with the drumsticks. And I was a drummer 100 years ago. So I’m like, Oh, that’s a brilliant example. So the thing is, it’s, you know, I want to say, like, not necessarily scalable, but like, he understood the person dove, you know, had the care, conscientious, you know, aptitude to ask the right question. Oh, you’re a drummer. Will treat it like, you know, then maybe he’s conscious enough. Hey, I’m going to ask the next person, next person, next person, ask him for a friend. How do you where’s the is there a line of, like, almost slipping into, like, micromanaging, or like, you know, or like, holding somebody’s hand too much compared to understanding somebody? Like, how do you meet somebody where they’re at without, like, Dude, can you back off like you’re taking it a little too far? You know what I’m you know what I’m asking, like, how do we where’s the balance there?

Julia Phelan  42:20

Well, I mean, I think, I think part of what you might be asking is, is, in a way, how, how is this practice of getting to figure out where people are? How is that, yeah, perhaps replicable or scalable? Is that sort of what you’re asking? Yeah, that that

Curt Anderson  42:38

more so like, how do I how do you not come across like, your micromanaging or like home in your head, you know, like, really, you know, like, how do you find that line of like, not tipping into like, a micromanaging type environment? Does that make sense? You know? I mean, yeah,

Julia Phelan  42:51

yeah. Well, and I think, I mean, a lot of it is going to be about listening, and also about experience. So, so you know, when you’re, when you’re teaching, let’s say you’re, you’re teaching a course like my husband teaches biology at UCI. He has so much experience and understanding of the sort of typical student trajectory as they are developing knowledge in the areas that he’s teaching. Obviously, everyone’s not the same, but most people who come into his class have a similar background and have similar motivations for being in his course and all of that. And so he can draw on this experience, and so he knows, okay, in the past, people tend to struggle with this concept, or in the past, I’ve had a lot of people always have questions about this, so I’m going to spend a bit of extra time on that, yeah and but then even, like, when you’re in a in a live in person environment, and you’re doing that, you might be seeing everyone’s eyes kind of glaze over, or you might be seeing a lot of people like, Oh yeah, and they’re writing stuff down, and You can, in real time, get some feedback as to, you know, what’s what’s working, what’s not working. And I think even if you’re in a, let’s say, the Water and Power Company context, you just have to be paying attention to even if you’re teaching a small group of new trainees, you know, are are you noticing like people making the same mistakes, or are you noticing, like, a lot of the same questions, or are you noticing that, you know, people seem to get be getting really bored at certain sections that you’re talking about and and that’s where you can make some of these adjustments. Or even just talk to people and figure out, you know, maybe, maybe you just happen to have a little cohort of folks who are new, who already know what you’re trying to teach them. And so you could figure that out and think, Okay, well, then I don’t really need to, we don’t really need to spend a lot of time on this. Let’s, let’s move on to the next thing. And so it’s, it’s trying to, you know, in a way, get some of that formative type feedback from people. And. You know, I’m not talking about making things individually customized, but just trying to get a sense of, just like when you’re giving a presentation, you know, or anything, you can kind of read the room, right? You could think, Okay, well, I’m talking about this. Everyone’s kind of like nodding, and they seem like they’re into it. And so, okay, that seems good. Everyone’s just like, what? Then maybe I need to switch up. And that’s where, again, having expertise is really valuable, because if you have deep expertise, you are able to pivot and adapt and switch your often and think, Okay, this strategy is not working, you know, I’m going to go to this one over here, and that’s, you know, when you have someone who’s a novice instructor and novice teacher. One of the downsides of that is that they don’t tend to have a lot of other alternative strategies if things aren’t working. And I think about this here with my mother, you know, she’s talking to somebody who doesn’t understand what she’s saying. You know, maybe they don’t speak English as their first language, or whatever it might be, and she just says, like, the same thing, louder, yeah. It’s like, well, yeah, so in that case, the up to 11 is not going to work out. Yeah, it’s like, she’s got a, she’s got to change her strategy. It’s like, if the you know, if you keep saying the same thing, the person’s like, not getting it’s like, okay, I have to, I gotta see what’s behind door number two. And, yeah, you can only do that if you have some other things in your tool belt,

Damon Pistulka  46:28

That’s too funny. I just don’t know how many times I’ve been in that situation where someone does that very thing. Yeah,

Julia Phelan  46:37

right, guess what? Not working. Yeah,

Curt Anderson  46:39

I’ve been guilty, you know, like, No, I said, right. So alright, I know. I know. Gosh, Julie, we’re coming into time a little bit. Here’s Hey, we got a few people here coming from 14. So we’ve got cell here. We’ve got

46:56

an international we’ve got

Curt Anderson  46:57

our friend here from Nigeria. We’ve got our friend here saying hey, hello, Mister Damon, Mister Curt, is Julia great topic talk about so guys again. Drop your check box. Let us know that you’re here. Drop Julia note on LinkedIn. Connect with her. She has all sorts of wonderful information. Let’s wind down on, how about marketing? If you don’t mind, we love helping people grow their sales, grow their business. Little tagline, if we did a jam session probably a year and a half ago, we called it. How do you out teach the competition? Julia, any a lot of these strategies are really, whether we’re onboarding a client, maybe, or, I’m sorry, onboarding an employee teammate, we’re trying to elevate a teammate, whether it’s safety instructional, whatever it might be. How can we talk a little bit about how are some of these strategies applicable for like, talking to customers, talking to our clients, trying to track new business? Any thoughts there?

Julia Phelan  47:47

Yeah, I mean, I think that. I mean, anytime you’re talking to a client, I mean, one of the things you need to figure out is what, what is it that they already know, or what is it that they need? And, you know, I’m not a sales person by any means, but you know, it’s, it really is a teachable moment, because, you know, and maybe you’ve got somebody who could use your product, but they don’t really know what it does, or they don’t really know what it is. And again, we think we can go back to thinking about problems to solve, and some of those end goals that if, if you have a sense of, okay, this person’s biggest, you know, pain point is, I don’t know, you know, employee retention or something like that, like, that’s what they’re really struggling with. And if there’s some product or service that you have that’s going to address that, but it’s helping to make that connection. But I could also imagine, in a situation where you’re selling an actual product, like, I think you and I, and I think it was Nicole, is that her name? We talked about that, about if you’ve got a new refrigeration system or something that you’re that you’re trying to sell to somebody. Well, one of the things you’re going to want to do is figure out, well, you know, how is it different, or how is it better than what they already have? Or how is this thing going to solve a problem that they have, but you have to not be talking about it in such a technical way. Perhaps that might not be, you know, where they’re coming from, maybe that, you know. And again, you’ve probably got all different types of stakeholders who might be involved in a sales type conversation. And so it’s thinking about, okay, which, which person am I talking to? Is the person I’m talking to most concerned about money, or most concerned about, you know, efficiency, or most concerned about longevity of the machine, or any, whatever it might be, and then help them understand how this particular product that you have is going to help them achieve that goal. But again, it goes back to what we were talking about with Damon, about, you know, just listening to people and figuring out, you know, where, where are people coming from? What do they already know? And again, almost like. Anticipating some questions that they have. And again, that comes from you having expertise in your area and trying to model the world of that that other person figure out, you know, what is it that they need you to explain? Because oftentimes it’s not everything you know. You can figure out pretty quickly. Okay, they already know about this aspect of it, the thing they really need to know is some other thing

Curt Anderson  50:24

you know. And just as you were talking, thank you. Phenomenal answer. So again, a great takeaway is just being that fierce educator, understanding where your ideal client is at. What are the like you said? What are the questions that they have, and how can you present them? You know you’re familiar with Lulu Lemon? I know you have three boys, but are you familiar? So I have a teenage daughter, like, if you have a teenage daughter, it’s all about Lululemon, right? So you know how that gentleman, he’s quite eccentric, but the gentleman that founded Lulu Lemon, he never hired a salesperson, hm? He strictly hired educators, interesting and what he did is, when he when he first launched the company Vancouver, it was like 2000 or whatever. He went out. He was hiring professionals. He hired people, women with law degrees, financial planners, teachers. And what he does, he did high level training. And so when you walked into the very first Lulu Lemon store, all the way up to, you know anyone today, and when you walk on the floor, they’re not sales people. They are called educators. It’s a brilliant business model on how this guy was just so unapologetically committed to educating. And so I love what you’re saying, but any so I’m kind of throwing an example at your What are your What are your thoughts, as you’re kind of hearing this from that company. What are your thoughts? Oh, I love

Julia Phelan  51:41

I mean, I love it. I love it. Because I think, I mean, again, I’m not a I’m not a sales, sales expert or a marketing expert. But I think that I personally am not excited about someone trying to persuade me to do something or to buy something that I don’t want, or, yeah, that. But I like the idea of somebody listening and trying to learn about, okay, well, what is it that you you, what’s the problem you’re trying to solve, and how can I help you solve it, rather than, how can I kind of persuade you or encourage you or force you to spend some money that you don’t really want to be spending. And so I, I like that that I could imagine. I mean, I’ve been into the store a few times. I think most of the times I’ve bought stuff from there. It’s been online. So experience. But I think that having a it’s just a different mindset, right? And it’s, it’s really trying to think of, how can that sales person meet you and think, Okay, what? What is it, the problem you’re trying to solve, but what are you looking for? And how can I help you? And if I can’t help you, then okay, you can go to another store. But I like that. I like that mindset.

Curt Anderson  52:52

Yeah. And matter of fact, our guest from Friday, he one of his Joe Sullivan from gorilla 76 we had one of his employees on our show last June, and she and we talked about, she was actually out of college. She worked at Lulu Lemon, she and so we brought that up, and she goes, You know what? That’s funny. You’re saying that I had six weeks of training before, like, she ever talked to a customer. Anyway, think about retail, you know, you walk into, like, whatever you know, target Nordstroms, whatever you know, your your local retail store is like she never talked to a customer without six weeks of training on how to be an educator. And so I just, I really admire, I feel like that. You know, she built a hugely successful, billion dollar company with that mindset. So I guess if he did it, maybe us solopreneurs and our smaller companies, we could do it as well. And I think that

Julia Phelan  53:40

speaks to what Damon was talking about with I think it was DuPont right, that that that that signals to people, if you’re spending six weeks training people, that signals to them that you care about them, and it signals to them that you take it seriously, that you have that there’s real information to to learn. And, you know, there are companies, I think it’s like canes chicken or something like that, that has has very similar thing where the amount of training they have, I think, is the outsider you might think, really they’re having that much training to work at, like the chicken restaurant, but, but on the flip side, they have huge retention. They have huge employee satisfaction, and they have a lot of employees who stay and get promoted up through the ranks. And that’s the that’s a powerful signal of a company that’s doing something right when it comes to learning, yeah,

Curt Anderson  54:30

that’s a great I just listened to, I listened to Guy Raz, how I built this, his podcast every week. And he just, they just had games. Oh,

Julia Phelan  54:39

they did. Oh, I’ll listen to that. Yeah, last week, yeah. You know,

Curt Anderson  54:43

again. Guy started it completely from scratch. He was fresh out of college, and just, you know, dedicated to that customer success. Julie, I don’t want to keep you before we went live, we can close out on this. You gave a wonderful example, and I apologize I didn’t bring this up sooner. You talked about, like, an example. With an armored car, and then you kind of like, that crisis moment. We’re like, geez, I haven’t been prepared. And you gave, like, the the famous, you know, here in the States, the Sully story. Just if we could close, I’m sorry to keep it, but I just love for you to just that was a powerful story. Just hear that one real quick, and then we’ll

Julia Phelan  55:15

wind down. Yeah, so we were talking about, about compliance, and how often times we give, we give people training and on procedures and protocols, but it’s not really at the right time, or they haven’t had time to practice it. And so oftentimes when I’m doing presentations and training, I’ll show a clip of a movie, and it’s two guys, they’re driving an armored car, they’ve got a bunch of money, like millions of dollars, in the back, and they’re dropping off a small amount of money at some warehouse or something. And so two guys are sitting in the front. The other guy’s gone into the warehouse, but the majority of the money is still in the truck, and all of a sudden, the guy inside has been like, taken hostage, or there’s something comes over the radio, like some bad stuff is happening. And the guy who’s in the driving seat, he’s like, okay, oh shoot, I know there’s a protocol for this. And he’s like, looking on the visor of the truck, and he’s like, I got a call in. No, no, no, we got to drive away. Oh, ah, and and so in the moment that, you know, hopefully never happens, but can happen that he was supposed to have been trained on he was trained on it, like, you know, a year ago or two years ago, whatever it was, never had to actually do it. And so now he’s in that situation, he doesn’t know what to do. And so if we’re going to have people, you know, learning things and learning protocols and procedures that could hopefully, we hope they don’t, but could happen, we need to give them the opportunity to practice. And then, you know, someone like Sully, you know, here’s a guy who has deep experience and expertise, has certainly done simulations, but he’s able to sort of pull those things together in a way that ultimately was successful. But you know, we need to have these opportunities to practice otherwise. You know that that really important procedure or protocol is sort of in one ear and out the other. Yeah.

Damon Pistulka  57:06

Great example. Okay,

Curt Anderson  57:07

that and, and, you know, Sully saved, you know, dozens, hundreds, or whatever. I don’t know the number, but, you know, tons, a lot, yeah, a lot of, you know, catch the movie, Google it correctly on the number. But wonderful examples. Julia, first off, let’s see if it doesn’t work, Damon, does it work? Oh, it doesn’t do it when we go live, right? So there it is. So I cannot express my thanks, my gratitude to you from the bottom my heart for take I know how busy you are. You have a lot going on in your world, and so thank you for taking the time to share with myself and Damon and our crowd out here today. I want to, I want to, I want to wish you and your family just a wonderful, incredible 2025, and it’s wonderful, great things out ahead. Damon, your thoughts takeaways from this wonderful conversation, Doctor Julia, today.

Damon Pistulka  57:57

No, it’s great having you here today, Doctor Julia, and just learning from you and to really help open our minds a bit more about the learning process. Thank you. Thank

Julia Phelan  58:08

you. It’s always a pleasure and a delight to see both of you, and we’ll do it again.

Curt Anderson  58:14

So as we close out, connect with Julia on LinkedIn. Go to it’s To Eleven solutions, I believe, is your toelevensolutions.com, anywhere else that folks can find you, Julia, anywhere

Julia Phelan  58:25

else. Those are my those are the two main places. Yeah, okay, thank you. Connect

Curt Anderson  58:29

with Julia on LinkedIn. Stop by her website. She has all sorts of wonderful things going on. Doctor Julia, hang out with us one second and Damon, as we’d love to say every week. Man, first off, filled with gratitude for Julia, filled with gratitude for our crowd out here today, and just go out and be someone’s inspiration. Because like you guys have no clue, I don’t say like that. That sounds wrong, right, but how inspiring Julia is to all of us, and so you know, again, connect with her, and we wish you an amazing, incredible week. Stay warm for those of us that are freezing. Yeah, we’ll talk to you. Great week. We have a great guest on Friday. We’ll see you Friday, bye.