Meg U'Ren, Ashley Li, & Allison White - Leaders Developing Leaders at Western University

How can the competition serve as a cornerstone for student leadership programming? I talk with Western University's CLC leaders about their unique approach to using CLC as a tool for student leaders developing other student leaders.

Our Guests
Meg U’Ren began her career as a high school teacher and eventually found her way into student affairs. She leads Student Engagement Programs at Western University and works with students to develop their own leadership. Check out her podcast, 40 Things at 40!

Allison White is a third-year university student pursuing an Honours in Business Administration degree at the Ivey Business School.  She got involved with the Leadership and Academic Mentorship Program (LAMP) at Western as a first-year committee member in 2018-2019 and remained involved as Leadership Chair in 2019-2020 and Leadership Student Coordinator in 2020-2021.

Ashley Li is a third-year Neuroscience student at Western University. She has been involved with mentorship and campus leadership throughout her undergraduate career and is currently serving as the  Leadership and Academic Mentorship Program (LAMP) Leadership Student Coordinator in 2020-2021.

What is the CLC?
Collegiate Leadership Competition (CLC), a nonprofit founded in 2015, creates a digital practice field where students can actively apply what they learn via CLC’s global virtual competition.

Colleges and universities identify a coach and recruit teams of six students. Any student interested in practicing leadership is welcome. Throughout the experience, each team member leads one challenge and receives extensive feedback based on their performance.

The competition begins in January. Competition activities occur via Zoom. The top 25 teams with the highest cumulative point total after the first four challenges compete in the global head-to-head in April.

CLC’s curriculum explores the attributes of effective leaders, leadership/followership styles, creative problem solving, influencing others, navigating difficult conversations, conflict resolution, delegation, stressors, and effective teaming.

Academic Articles About CLC

• CLC Website
• Rosch, D. M., & Headrick, J. (2020). Competition as leadership pedagogy: An Initial Analysis of the Collegiate Leadership Competition. Journal of Leadership Education, 19(2).
• Allen, S. J., Jenkins, D. M., & Buller, E. (2018). Reflections on how learning in other domains inform our approach to coaching leadership. Journal of Leadership Studies, 11(4), 58-64.
• Allen, S. J. (2018). Deliberate practice: A new frontier in leadership education. Journal of Leadership Studies, 11(4), 41-43.
• Allen, S. J., Jenkins, D. M., Krizanovic, B. (2017). Exploring Deliberate Practice & the Use of Skill Sheets in the Collegiate Leadership Competition. Journal of Leadership Education, 17(1), 28-34.

Resource Mentioned In This Episode

• Book: Untamed by Glennon Doyle  
• Podcast: SimplyPodLogical 
• The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and R

Transcript

Note: Voice-to-text transcriptions are about 90% accurate. 

Scott Allen  0:00  

Today on Phronesis. We are continuing our conversations with people who are involved in the collegiate leadership competition. So I have Allison White, Ashley Li, and Meg, U'Ren. Alison White is a third-year university student pursuing an Honors in Business Administration degree at the ivy business school. She got involved with leadership and academic mentorship program lamp at Western as a first-year committee member in 2018 2019. And she's remained involved as a leadership share in 2019 2020. And she's a leadership student coordinator in 2020, and 2021. So you're going to get the picture here at Western, they have a lot going on, and it's really, really cool. Ashley is a third-year student. She's a neuroscience major at Western. She's been involved with mentorship and campus leadership throughout her undergraduate career and is currently serving as the lamp leadership student coordinator as well. And Meg began her career as a high school teacher and eventually found her way into Student Affairs at Western University. She works with students to develop their own leadership. She has her own podcast. We'll hear about that a little bit later. Thank you, everybody, so much for being here. Allison, maybe share a little bit more about you. What blanks could you fill-in? Yeah, so

Allison White  1:15  
I've always really liked leadership. In high school, I used to go to leadership camps, I was involved with Student Council, and they would send us to do these three-day retreats. They're very fun, we got to do many different things. Like we'd go kayaking, we do high ropes. And all of it had the goal of working towards building a better team and being more better leaders so that we could bring that back and apply it in high school. So I always really like that, even in high school and like it as a child. So coming to Western, I naturally looked for leadership opportunities. That's how I ended up with LAMP. And I really enjoy it and have superfit ever since.

Scott Allen  1:50  
So for our listeners, Allison and Ashley are undergrads, they are in their third year on campus. And they have been involved throughout their time at Western and now they're actually leading. And so it's a wonderful opportunity for them on campus to progress in from a participant into an actual leader of some of these programs. And Ashley, tell us a little bit about you. Yeah, so

Ashley Li  2:16  
I think in a similar vein, as Alison, I got involved in leadership very early on, in high school. And it was something that I kind of stumbled into actually, I was very, very shy when I was younger. And I never really saw myself as like the stereotypical student leader. But I did get involved in student council and I got involved in a lot of student organizations, and I realized how valuable and how fulfilling it is to work at a team in order to improve the lives of the people in your community. That's really stuck with me ever since. And it's been something that's been a very integral part of my life. And I've carried that into university. And so like, just all of those experiences have really helped me cultivate a passion for peer mentorship and peer leadership.

Scott Allen  3:02  
See, that's just wonderful. Because having these experiences now, and combining with a business degree or a degree in neuroscience, it's such a powerful combination, because I imagine some of your peers in neuroscience haven't been engaged in some of this leadership programming to the level and to the degree you have. And I think that combination is just so cool. It's so wonderful. And Meg, tell us a little bit about you, you are somewhat of an architect when it comes to these experiences that the students are having. And maybe tell us a little bit about LAMP after you share a little bit about you.

Meg U'Ren  3:36  
Sure, happy to Scott happen. Thank you for having us on as well, because it's such a joy and truthfully, I consider myself kind of a supporting actor to Allison and Ashley, because they're the ones who have done the bulk of the work and the initiative here at Western. But I digress anyway. So yeah, my career began in education. So I started as a high school teacher. And I realized within a couple of months that I didn't want to be a high school teacher. But I did it for three years because I needed a job. And then eventually, like so many people, I found myself in student affairs, I found myself wanting to work with students, but I didn't want to teach them full time. So I changed and I sort of pivoted my career and it's been an absolute joy. I think it's my niche in my market. I love working with students, I love getting to take ideas and watch them run with it and consider myself sort of a mentor behind the scenes. So I did you just complete I have to give a plug to my own education. I did complete my Master's in education and educational leadership. So I did some theory and development because I obviously really liked this topic. But you and I met Scott a few years ago at a CLC challenge here in Ontario in Canada. And when I did it, I thought this is fantastic. I need to bring this back to my own campus. So I stole your ideas and said I need to give an opportunity for certain students to do this leadership development because I really was on board with this idea of taking students putting it into action and having a chance to really develop themselves. I just saw the transformation myself and was committed. So I brought back this idea to my own campus and thought, how can we take leadership development? How can we take the curriculum? So we worked alongside you to have Western to have a team. And really it was Allison and Ashley, my student leaders who took this idea and then paired it into this last year, right, which has been entirely virtual. How do we make leadership development over a year where we haven't physically been in the same space with each other? Since last spring, I think was the last date that we were all together. So yeah, that's a little bit about us in our program, and some of the work that we're doing trying to do leadership development in a more robust way, in a different way, in an innovative way. I think that's sort of the motivation here.

Scott Allen  5:52  
I love it. I love it. Well, and Allison and Ashley, I think, well, the three of us were on a phone call, probably a couple of months back, and all of you are sharing with me some of how it works at Western. So I would love for either Alison or Ashley, one of you to share a little bit about how the program works. But then the two of you have been heavily involved in taking a lot of these activities that we maybe did face to face, and moving them online. And really, as undergraduates designing new leadership activities, which I think is just absolutely it's, it's incredible. It's so much fun to learn about your adventures. So

Allison White  6:38  
I'll talk first just about how like we structure our program here at Western. So what we do is we focus the program on first-year undergraduate students, so they're fresh out of high school, and they're into this new sort of university life experience with kids, which is very intimidated, right, and you need new leadership skills. It's very different from high school. So what we do is we take a team of upper-year students, usually second-year and third-year students, but sometimes fourth-year or above as well. And we hire like eight of them and make pairs. So they work in teams of two. And then they hire first-year students teams of six that they will mentor throughout the year. The first semester, we focus on teaching the CLC curriculum, and just getting them to practice we also add opportunities up we have this thing called an LC squared. So the leadership chair life chat. So lt squared, where the leadership chairs get to plan, something that's very relevant in leadership and very helpful to the first year is things around like mental health. This year, we had someone do journaling, that kind of thing. Yeah. And the first semester is really focused on one second semester, we get into a competition mode. And when we start practicing some of the CLC past activities, we have a mini competition, usually at the end of the first semester to sort of transition over into the second semester. And then of course, in February, once the competition start, our teams all compete up until the last run, where we send our last team, or our best performing team to represent Western and the overall city.

Scott Allen  8:11  
Yes, and that's this weekend. I'm feeling anxious,

Meg U'Ren  8:16  
or excited.

Scott Allen  8:17  
I'm feeling anxious. Well, then Ashley, as you all have moved some of these activities from an analog in-person domain to a digital space. Talk a little bit about that. What are some themes you've noticed in moving these activities to an online space, and then maybe with the three of us, we get into this conversation about building teams when we're remote,

Ashley Li  8:41  
it was definitely an adventure this year. I think Allison and I got just a little taste of what you do on a much larger scale for the CLC of trying to adapt and create activities that are going to work for for the teams. And also just like taking all of the logistical considerations in mind. I think we had we were really lucky in that we had the last year's like in-person activities and also the activities that you provided us with as a base. But definitely we had to change a lot of things just given the limitations because I think so much of team building, and so much of these typical leadership activities is so heavily based on everyone being in person and being able to physically collaborate. And I do think that you know, things like that we typically think of when we do at leadership camps, like human knots, or, you know, last year where we built a Pringle ring, it's so challenging to try and capture that camaraderie and that teamwork virtually, but I think we've definitely taken advantage of all of the technology at our disposal. We obviously use zoom for all of our calls, but we also looked into a lot of collaborative software that would allow us to kind of mimic that in-person collaborative view. Like with a time sent in a time-sensitive manner, yeah, where people could work together and see each other's progress. And we really needed to focus on how to engage people, even when it is virtual because so much of team building and that camaraderie does come from being physically close to people and talking and building those relationships. And it definitely is a lot harder to do through zoom and through a screen. And so we try to focus on all the different ways that we could get people to work together, whether it's like maybe focusing a little bit more on discussion, or splitting up the tasks in a way that is convenient over a virtual call. And we kind of worked from there and really just did a lot of troubleshooting and tested a lot of different activities on our some of our team members and just seeing like, oh, my goodness, okay, so this did not go the way that we thought it would like, let's modify it, or Wow like the tech is just too difficult. So let's find another platform was there's no really simple answer. It was just a lot of brainstorming and troubleshooting really

Scott Allen  11:06  
Well, I love what you just said about testing it on your friends, because of the activities we're doing this coming weekend, we tested those on our friends last September and October. And we went through the experiences ourselves and play tested them and went through all of the different combinations of how these things could work. And so  it's not easy, and you think that a certain thing is going to go a certain way, or someone has a certain question that you never ever would have imagined. Where they come up with a solution that you never would have imagined and the art of designing some of these activities to make them a challenge and to make them work. There's a lot that goes into it. But you also said something, actually that I really want to follow up on with the three of you. What have you learned about building relationships online this year? How did you build those relationships? How did you focus on that area? And did it work? In your opinion? Did we get as far as we've gotten in the past? Did we not quite get there? What would we do differently? What do you all think about relationship building?

Meg U'Ren  12:10  
I could jump in, I wanted to just say this because I love relationship building. And I think I've modeled this in the way Allison and Ashley and I have to work together, right? So we have this common purpose, we're going to bring this ELC curriculum to Western, we want to give first-year students the opportunity to work on this, we have a bit of a framework, and that's about as filled in as we are. And so we all need to get to know each other and know what are our skills, what are we bringing to this conversation, I have kind of that context, historical knowledge, and then the linchpin or the piece with the larger university thinking about what we need to be doing. But we invest a lot of time and I think both of you do this and well, as well as establishing personal relationships with each other. So we work really on that foundational piece and spend a lot of time initially on Who are you let's have some games together. Let's have those initial icebreakers which you can do so easily. We played so many Jackboxes here. I don't know if you've played it, Scott. But I have played all versions of all games. Did the three of us play one together? One time I had no, we had only should have I played so many, and became such an amateur at it. But any kind of games or activities to help that camaraderie spirit and we spend a lot of time in a meeting rather than jumping in and the usual platitudes. I think this is something you need in digital engagement communities rather than how is everybody we're good. Okay, and we move on. You spend time being like, oh, Ashley, you're from Niagara Falls, I'm going to be heading there. What do I need to know? Or Allison, tell me about this intense HBA cap you're going to, which is a thing that Allison is doing. If we get a chance to talk about it, this insane-sounding leadership opportunity that she's doing for school, I will let her explain. But you have time to build those connections. And I think if you're talking about working with a team, you cannot underscore the importance of chit-chat discussion team building bonded getting to know each other because it's from there. Everything else flows.

Scott Allen  14:01  
Yes. Yes. Well, and Alison and Ashley, you are building relationships, not only with your coaches but then helping them to help set them up to build relationships with their teams. Allison, what do you think? Yeah, I just wanted

Allison White  14:14  
to touch on something. I think it's a little bit of a myth if you will, its own breakout room and the power of the breakout. So for the breakout rooms, I know that what I've seen a lot in a lot of the activities I've been involved with this year is just, oh, let's use as many breakout rooms as we can. Let's always put people in breakout rooms and breakout rooms are great. And they are a good way to allow people to get to know each other and chat and that kind of thing. Right? But they're not the end all be all the amazing thing that people seem to think that they are. So one thing that Ashley and I focused on a lot is they have eight LCS right eight leadership chairs. And so when we have our regular meetings with them, there's like 10 of us in zoom call. And that's a lot of people right and then we would often use breakout rooms to like work on something or etcetera, we did like our team reveals, through breakout rooms and that kind of thing. But we're very strategic about them like we didn't. Oftentimes, we went do random breakout rooms, particularly not at first, and we encouraged our LPs to do the same with their teams like place people strategically, who you think will get along well, because it's really intimidating when you show up to a breakout room, and you just have like three strangers are meant to talk with and you don't relate on anything at all at the start. Because you have to remember like in person, people will be able to sit next to the person they choose to sit next to, they'll be able to gravitate towards someone that they found interesting, or that they might have an interesting conversation with write rooms. Often, it's just like, we've put random people together. Good luck, though, I think that's really key. We also did a social event. And we use breakout rooms a lot there to some of them are random. But we always gave them a prompt that was sort of a good way, an easy, safe way for them to start to get to know each other, not jumping in with deep prompts. Like, tell us about your biggest fear. No, that was like for breakout rooms that people already knew each other and they feel comfortable. We started with silly things. I think we were having a debate about whether the hot dog a taco or a sandwich, those kinds of things just to get the conversation going. But no one has to feel very vulnerable, because it's not a very serious argument or a conversation. I just wanted to mention that about breakout rooms and how we use those.

Scott Allen  16:27  
I love it. What else from a relationship-building standpoint? And did it work? Ashley, what do you think Did it work?

Ashley Li  16:33  
And Allison and I's opinion that we thought the year went really well. And we were able to forge some really strong connections with our coaches. And I know we've gotten kind of the same feedback from our first-year teams, I think it's really important relationally to almost remember that you can't approach social interaction with like the same mindset as you would in person sometimes. I know like myself, and a lot of my peers have experienced this year where I think there's just so much more social anxiety and so much more self-consciousness this year, especially with like COVID, and not interacting with people as often. And also just like online, it's so easy to feel attached and self-conscious. And so I think you just always need to go that extra step, when you're trying to help a team bond and help a team build relationships, in the sense that like, maybe in person, you could just like, like Alison was saying, like, you could just toss like, say like, okay, you to go off and talk. And because they're next to each other, it's so much easier, but you just have to, I guess, like give them that extra prompt, give them that extra segue into a conversation that they might be able to relate to turn up the energy and just be that extra 20% more cheerful and more energetic than you might need to be in person because I think we need to overcome some of those limitations in zoom. So you do need to kind of overcompensate a little bit to promote that feeling of closeness and, and to help people feel more comfortable with each other.

Scott Allen  18:06  
I mean, there are missed opportunities in this new domain, which might even be just I'm gonna go grab a cup of coffee and you want to come with or we're walking into the building together. And we're just having two minutes of chit-chat while we get to the meeting, or we finish up. And we're walking back in the same direction that all of those are, you know, not possibilities necessarily in this domain. But it is an interesting puzzle. Can we still build that sense of team? Will Western's team on Saturday, when we have the competition at the end where they feel like they worked as a team where they feel like they got to know one another? And I can't wait to see the results. Mike, what do you think? I think

Meg U'Ren  18:50  
it makes me think of March Madness, Scott, this is the CLC that will shift it into March. And we'll see if your bracket wins, I have to say my competitive spirit, which isn't overwhelmingly strong, I really want Western to win this thing so badly. Because I've just seen how much work has been happening in the last two years to really refine, we've got eight months how do we prepare students to be in the pressure cooker situation and to deliver and to remember these concepts we've taught and get to apply it? Yeah. So we'll see if they can bring that energy and that determination and the skills that they've put into action? And can they actually translate it into a win in real-time? But isn't that one of the strengths of it right is that you learn a framework for leadership rather than sitting and having this information and integrating it in? I mean, if you do leadership development theories, which sadly I did do for my master's, there are so many even the terms is it transformative leadership, transformational leadership, two totally different things. So when you study leadership development theory, it's so diverse, but what better way to learn basic models of how you're going to combat problems or how you're going to tackle scenarios, or how you're going to structure your team's effort to achieving something and get to measure it through a rubric and through the actual skill itself. So I'm really hoping Western brings it home. But regardless of how they do, I will say this, I will be proud of them. I want them to know that that I am a big, big fan of all of the work that the team has done. But yeah, I am hoping for a win.

Scott Allen  20:25  
Well, it's interesting because I think I came across an article or actually was a book in my Ph. D program was called learning in adulthood. And it was by two women Merriam and Baumgartner arm, sorry, Maryam and Kapha rella. They added Baumgartner a little bit later as an author. But in this book, there's this beautiful visual, and this is how much of a geek I am, because I'm about to tell you about a beautiful, beautiful visual of different learning theories. But basically, they highlighted five basic orientations to learning. So you have cognitivism, which is learning the stuff and all of the mental processing that we do, there is behaviorism, which is the skill-building in that developmental space, humanism, kind of that personal growth domain, my identity, my values, that whole humanistic perspective. And then there was the social cognitive, which is learning from peers or from mentors, and constructivist, which is experiential learning from experience. So if we want to create a world-class, pilot, we probably need an individual with the knowledge, the skills, the mentors, the experience, and hopefully they know themselves. Same thing with a surgeon. And we need to do all of those types of learning to facilitate growth. And as we design CLC, we really had those five domains in mind, we want people to know some of the content, not a whole bunch of things, but at least 60 or 70 things about leadership. So there's some informed behavior going on. We want to develop skills, can we engage in this problem-solving model have this difficult conversation? Can we choose a leadership style, we wanted people to learn about themselves and get to know what it is they value and how they personally experience, challenge and frustration, and struggle. And then the coach, all of you are serving as mentors and guides in that process. And then that experience, right? So if we can combine all five of those, or a domain or dimension of all five of those, because we can't go too deep in any one of those. But maybe we provide a little bit of a different type of leadership development experience. And that's the goal. Right? That's, that's, and so mag, I love your passion for the win. But also, yeah, how do we do this a little bit differently? And how do we explore in a more, I would argue, well-rounded way, it's not just one of those domains or orientations of learning, it's multiple orientations of learning.

Meg U'Ren  22:59  
And for us, just because we're tackling first-year students, I think that's great, right, so much attention is paid. And I don't know what it's like at your institution. But I will say at Western, oftentimes, student leadership doesn't happen until the second, third, or fourth year. And so I think what's so great is we target first-year students because we say, let's get you involved with get working on your leadership competencies early on because we know you've already had somebody skills you're bringing with you. We don't need to wait until your third or fourth year we can do it now. Allison. Yeah, I

Allison White  23:27  
just wanted to say that I had the sort of special privilege of being able to interview a lot of the first-year students that went through the program because I'm returning to this position again next year as I was interviewing future leadership chairs. And it's really amazing how all of them, every single one that interviewed, didn't seem very fixated on the ankle, like as much as we want Lester to go out and win. And like, that's a really amazing goal. And something that we're definitely rooting for, it was really cool to see that the program had a much deeper impact. Even the teams that were maybe a little bit lower scoring and knew they didn't have a chance to actually make it or beat the team to represent Western. They were still so passionate about it. They talked about their mentors, really positively, mentors that they've never met in person, I guess that's. So I think it's really cool how that was possible. But then also, they had so much passion about wanting to carry it forward and be able to do the mentor first year, next year, so they could have the same experience. So the CLC curriculum in a way, last year, we also applied it and used it but it was our first year doing that in LMAP. And we sort of, I would say missed the boat a little bit, in the sense of you're very much focused on the competition. And the teams that didn't get to represent Western felt very unsatisfied and very disappointed that they learned that this year, it's like a complete, like 180 it's completely different. It was really interesting how we're able to do that. Even in the Light landscape?

Scott Allen  25:01  
Well, the competition is really just an excuse to get people together and have them practice. Don't tell anyone that. But you know, it's I love the competition as well. I think it's fun. And it's interesting. But how do we create a practice field where, again, we can engage in some concepts, but then explore those concepts in kind of a semi-stressful real situation? Of course, it's not "real real." It's somewhat manufactured still, but we're getting out of our head a little bit. It's not a case study. It's not a discussion. It's an activity. And there are others engaged in this activity. And stress is a little bit heightened. And we need to put these concepts into action. There are floatation devices, and can we use them? And so it's a different approach. It's a different experience. But I'm so happy to hear that, Allison, that you had those individuals who are passionate about giving back and staying engaged and staying involved, and creating that experience for others. I know we are a little bit short on time, I would love to close out our time today with just a quick What have you been reading that has caught your eye or streaming or listening to or watching that's caught your eye in the last few months? Meg?

Meg U'Ren  26:16  
All right. I'll tell you what I've been listening to. Well, you know, I talked about this with you a little bit. I think that I've been listening to my own podcast a little bit because I also added it. Yes. So I appreciate whoever's going to edit this. I don't know if it's used. God, I appreciate your editing ability, because I know what it's like to listen to it enough to snip sound bites out. But I started I turned 40 and 2021 a year to turn 40 Yes, sir. I'm locked down. I turned 40. And so a girlfriend and I decided to make a list of 40 things we wanted to do in our 14th year to make turning 40 exciting. And then the more we did this, and we talked to other people, the more they were like, great, I should do that. And so we decided during lockdown to start a podcast, where because we'd like to talk and really if you'd like to talk, it's great. Got a computer, you've got a podcast.  We've been involved in I don't know if you've ever done it with a family member. But having interviewing your family member about something you're doing that you're passionate about is lovely because you learn all these parts of them that you didn't realize existed. But I've been doing that in terms of what I've been listening to or watching. I've just or I'm in a book club. I don't know, shout out to anybody who's doing book clubs, because they're lovely ways of reading different things. But we've started untamed by Glenn and Doyle. I'm all about female empowerment lately all about this idea as an aging person and as a woman and as a mother. Where does my leadership intersect? I'm really interested in this topic. So I'm reading untamed, and learning about what role women have to play. It's an interesting take on leadership development, kind of in a less formal way. But that one's really been resonating with me lately, and I've been sort of thinking about that lens a lot.

Scott Allen  28:11  
Awesome. And I will put a link to your podcast in the show notes, you can find that that's a wonderful idea. And the family members, I love it. I should interview my children and see what they think. I'll ask them who's the better leader mom or dad?

Meg U'Ren  28:25  
Don't ask that question.

Scott Allen  28:29  
I already know the answer! That's Mom! Allison. What have you been looking into?

Allison White  28:36  
Yeah, mine is gonna sound way less academic and professional. But I do watch a lot of YouTube. And one of the YouTubers I like to watch is called simply nail logical. She does like crazy videos and all kinds of things. She used to be more focused on nail art itself. But she started a podcast sometime last year if I'm not mistaken. That's really interesting. So just she talks about things that she wouldn't normally talk about on the channel and it gives you an inside look at how YouTubers can be real people. In her case, she's a Canadian YouTuber. She also works as a crime statistics in the Canadian government and holds her day job at the same time as she runs her YouTube channel. So she'll talk about things like sponsorships How much money do you actually make on YouTube compared to a day job? and all kinds of topics that are heavier, some are lighter, but some are heavier. And I just think it's really interesting to see sort of YouTubers and influencers come out and talk on a different lens about this clout that they have and this basically influence that they have over other people and so I highly recommend the podcast is called simply pod logical.

Scott Allen  29:49  
Isn't that such a fascinating space in the whole influencer domain, right. My son was watching I think the first time it came on my radar. There was a young man opening Pokemon cards, and that was the YouTube video. I was like, wow, this is a thing. But it's grown, it's flourished. It's interesting. It's a very, very fascinating space. So I will put that in the show notes as well. Thank you, Alison. And Ashley.

Ashley Li  30:15  
I think for me, I've been reading this book called The righteous mind by Jonathan Hite. I don't know if anyone's heard of it, it's I think it's becoming a lot more popular. But it's basically a book written by a social psychologist talking about the psychology and the sociology behind why we're divided by religion, and all of these different attitudes that we have. And he goes into, like the evolutionary psychology behind why we, you know, we form group attitudes and why there is discrimination and all of these things, but also takes a very realistic approach to talk about how to overcome these divides. And I'm two-thirds of the way through. But so far, it's been really fascinating. And I think it's just so relevant to the current climate that we're working in, where we have to increasingly work with a very diverse range of people, whether it's backgrounds or beliefs, or attitudes. And he, he lays out some really, really interesting and scientifically backed approaches to how to overcome this and how to form a connection and work together with people who might share different values. And I think it's just so, so valuable right now.

Scott Allen  31:43  
Yeah. Oh, for sure. And there are so many different lenses that we can look at the concept of leadership through or just how we exist as human beings. It reminds me what you just said, Ashley, there was a book A few years ago, that was popular called Sapiens. I don't know if you've ever heard of that book. But that was a fascinating read, and just why we are the way we are what we've carried, you know, biologically or environmentally or culturally what we've carried forward, and what of that is beneficial for us. And what of that maybe isn't beneficial for us any longer and how we continue to evolve, right? Well, maybe we closed down there. Okay. I will see the three of you in a couple of days online. I am appreciative for the relationship we've built this year. Is definitely one benefit of this whole experience is that whether I am in Cleveland, Ohio, or Ontario, it doesn't matter. We can still build a relationship. And so thanks to the three of you for your time today, Allison and Ashley, wow, how awesome your juniors in your collegiate experience and just doing incredible work and helping this machine move forward on campus. I think that's just awesome. Meg, you're creating a space for that to exist. And that's, that's great work. That's awesome. Thanks to the three of you be well.

All 33:14  
Thank you, Scott. Thank you.

Scott Allen  33:18  
Bye bye.

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