Phronesis: Practical Wisdom for Leaders with Scott Allen

Brenden Newton - I’m Gonna Walk With You

January 01, 2022 Scott J. Allen Season 1 Episode 102
Phronesis: Practical Wisdom for Leaders with Scott Allen
Brenden Newton - I’m Gonna Walk With You
Show Notes Transcript

Happy New Year!

Brendan Newton is a husband, father, ex-professional bodyboarder, mental health awareness advocate, and recruitment manager for the Australian Indigenous Mentoring Experience (AIME). AIME builds “Unlikely Connections for a Fairer World.” Brendan’s intense approach to the ocean translates into all aspects of his life–a life devoted to his family, inspiring others, and serving the disadvantaged.  He is also the host of The Grey Space podcast which is about "healing loudly by addressing mental health & trauma, gently, yet openly... A space to be honest."

Learn More About AIME

A Quote From This Episode

  • "Our current systems value the capacity to meet results immediately. That's a really difficult thing for someone who has been put on the margins for the first 10 years of their life–through no fault of their own."

Resources Mentioned In This Episode

  • Book: CHERUB by Robert Muchamore 
  • Movie: Dear Rider: The Jake Burton Story
  • John Wooden Quote: "If you're not making mistakes then you're not doing anything. I'm positive that a doer makes mistakes."

About The International Leadership Association (ILA)

  • The ILA was created in 1999 to bring together professionals with a keen interest in the study, practice, and teaching of leadership. 

Connect with Scott Allen

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

Scott Allen  0:01  
Okay, everyone, good morning. Good evening. Good afternoon, wherever you are in the world. Today, I am speaking with Brenden Newton. And I'm really looking forward to this conversation, we are going to discuss an organization based in Australia. That's called AIME. And this is an organization that was founded in 2004. By now, which is 2021. They're in 52 Different countries doing some incredible work. There have been Harvard Business School case studies written on the organization, they are working to make a difference in the world. I love some of the verbiage that they use and how they speak about their work, unlikely connections, and building bridges. I think it's really, really noble work that the organization is doing. And Brendon, maybe tell listeners a little bit about you first, thank you for being with me, sir. So it's good to see you. Yeah, maybe tell people a little bit about the organization. And then let's hear a little bit about you. I'd love to hear your story as well.

Brenden Newton  1:01  
No worries, Scott, it's great to be here. Great to be talking to all of the potential listeners out there. And I'm excited to connect on the other side of the world. The organization, we're been going hard with for a lot of years now is AIME. You know, AIME originally was coined by its founder, when he was a 17-year-old youngster at Sydney University. It's an Aboriginal Australian native and a real personality, you know, I'm talking like Steve Jobs kind of Richard Branson, kind of Nelson Mandela corner, you know, those kinds of vibrant, absolute Stardust creatures that are dreaming of a new world and a fairer world from the age of 10 years old. So he started it. And he called it the Australian Indigenous Mentoring Experience (AIME). A couple of years later, he threw that name in the bin and just call that AIME. Because he realized his aspirations were to change the world, not just Australia. So he started out with 2020 kids down at the local high indigenous population High School. And he went into that high school with 20 of his university friends. And he literally walked in with this fascinating brand-new energetic pedagogy, and he said, "You guys have everything within you, that you will ever need to be number one, proud of your culture and your background number two, to kick ass at school and play that game too. And then number three, dream of your own dreams and go and achieve them like no one else has done before." So it was a really different approach. And he broke through a lot a cut through a lot of noise for a lot of kids. And that mentoring that engagement between your tertiary relatively privileged tertiary students from Sydney University, one of the most prestigious, oldest money in Australia, they're walking down the road to work with Aboriginal kids. And that that bridge that started to get built was, I think, the foundation of the DNA of AIME that exists in meeting different people and actually having real connections with people you wouldn't otherwise have. So

Scott Allen  3:17  
I love that you had sent me a video and I'll put a link to this video in the show notes for listeners. But at the end of this video, there's a phrase and it says if we want to change the world, we need to change the way it works. And it's just a beautiful, beautiful video, that nicely kind of captures in a visual form exactly what it is the organization's trying to do. Right?

Brenden Newton  3:42  
Yeah, I mean, that's cool. I mean, it is, it is good to have good collateral and good, good themes, good principles, stuff like that. But you know, deeper than that we all as humans, I think it's important to recognize where both good and bad we've got, you know, we've got white and black, we've got, you know, we've got a mixture of traits. And as we go into the world, it is so important that we were not too noble about how we do it, we go in and we acknowledge the good and bad in each other too. But actually making connections with people we wouldn't otherwise connect with is, I think, foundationally what our future is about as a, as a, as a race,

Scott Allen  4:21  
I've been having some really fun conversations with a mentor of mine, and this podcast was released a few weeks back, but it's a gentleman named John Morgan. And essentially, he's come up with what he calls a deep learning mindset. One of the fundamental tenants according to the research, is if you want people to develop and grow and evolve, you have to be engaged in conversations with people who have other lived experiences. You can't just sit in your own silo and assume that you're going to have a wide perspective on the world. So that statement just wholly resonates with me. Are you building relationships? and connections. And I think if that was a focus of, of our globe, which it sounds like it's a focus of AIME building relationships. It's absolutely critical.

Brenden Newton  5:09  
Yeah. I mean, it's super important for us over the next decade to see how we can really play out a quite an arrogant statement, which is, you know, can we change these current kinds of tunneled versions of systems which perpetuates disadvantage, and I think critical to that is, is really going the other way to some of the social media, algorithmic stuff where you're, you're introduced to people that you know, or things that you know, already, but rather than that we're trying to build unlikely connections based on people we don't know or things we don't know. That's, I think that's the key if we're going to find solutions for all these kinds of a quagmire of environmental and societal issues,

Scott Allen  5:53  
Talk about your path to AIME and talk about your role and how you were connected with the organization. Because you have a background that for some might feel like a very different background, and maybe what you're doing right now Yeah,

Brenden Newton  6:09  
I suppose it's hard to tell my story without acknowledging the origin, I used to get taken to football games. It's not an NFL back here. It's, you know, rugby league, but a very similar vibe. And I'd stand up behind my grandpa as a 10-year-old and he'd intentionally pick fights with the, with the other members of the crowd. And, and that was, you know, he was like a really principled kind of man, like a lovely guy, good family, man, stuff like that. But he had this rebellious streak where he just so much like he just wants to like pick fights, you know, like, and for me, that was really interesting. And I think it's kind of formulated how I approach the world have always looked for ways to break the system. And I don't think it's something I'm projecting out of my own insecurity. It's more it's like a trait that I value. Yeah, my personal journey was that I grew up I suppose in a schoolyard, some of my first memories were going to every group at every table and spending time with them. And I really couldn't swallow this concept of there being like this cool group. And then there's this nerdy group. And then there's this other group, I just, I felt angry and upset at that idea, and would constantly do loops around the, to make sure, I was connecting with everyone, which is, I think, quite countercultural, and something I'm really proud of, but it was, you know, just something quite innocent at the time. And as I grew up, I spent a lot of time chasing big waves of I'm a risk-taker by nature, not in, don't think in the sense where, hey, I'm just gonna go and explode myself because I'm internally exploding. What's more, it's just part of my DNA. So attached are lots of big waves. And we did lots of documentaries over a decade writing my boogie board down, waves in the Canary Islands, and New Zealand, and Tahiti and all sorts of places have made about three videos that was really special to cut my teeth on a global scene. In a particular sport and subculture, I learned a few things there. However, I think the clincher of my personal experience to develop me who I really, really am, is the struggle I had, particularly with obsessive-compulsive disorder, that became a really dominant feature of my daily life, at the age of 1819, had always had traits towards anxiety and obsessive thinking, which, to many people's perspective, you know, that's helpful in some cases. But I think where it's diagnoseable, and actually creates significant disturbance is when you're debilitated on a daily basis. And it really ruined my life for a number of years. And it's something I still grapple with on a daily basis. However, it's been the most wonderful teacher in it's invited me to get to know who I am within myself and within my mind, and manage that and develop techniques of meditation to curb that into a positive frame. And then after that, it's, it's then developed this, this real softness towards people and people on the margins that experience maybe life slightly more difficult, with more difficulty, and that, for me, has really informed my work with Aboriginal people in Australia, and over the last, particularly over the last 10 years, or globally as we work as a global mentoring program for minority populations. So that's some of my stories. I'm here on the east coast of Australia with my wife and two kids and, you know, live in life and

Scott Allen  9:45  
Brandon, talk about some observations you've had in your time working with AIME. How have your perspectives shifted in those years? What what are some themes that come to mind for you?

Brenden Newton  9:59  
Mostly, our current systems value the capacity to meet results immediately. And that's a really difficult thing for someone who has been put on the margins, for example, for the first 10 years of their life through no fault of their own. Yeah, and we've got colonization stories all over the planet, where, unfortunately, there are big educational attainment rate gaps, and even that education system is, is framed up in a certain way. And that sucks because what we're doing is we're in the first hour, for example of interaction with a young person or with anyone, we're judging where they fit on a social scale and pigeonholing them. According to that, I think that's the main thing I've learned and seen. And I think we need to design systems as a globe as nations that acknowledged the nuance of intelligence, and the diversity of intelligence. That's something I'm really passionate about, you know, one of my favorite things is to walk into a room of Aboriginal kids and just see the intelligence alive in their interactions. Yeah, there's this like, there's this just, there's a palpable spirit that you can kind of walk and touch and see and, and it's just alive like completely iced to go sit in the Aboriginal community, on the south coast of New South Wales, when I was particularly mentally ill. And I'd sit and roll a bowl across the grass with a bunch of 13-year-olds, and I'll get goosebumps even talking about it. It just, there's something there that you just don't get anywhere else was life so difficult for some of these kids? Well, maybe because the first time they went to school, within the first hour, they'd get put in a certain class and a certain group and, and off, they go on that trajectory, based on reasonably arbitrary criteria. And I know that the Australian Aboriginal stories, no different from the Indian American story are no different from the, you know, the slums in Rio de Janeiro, you know, it's just, it's nonsense. So we need to develop alike, I think you sang deep learning that your body was talking about?

Scott Allen  12:04  
What is in your opinion, based on the work that you're doing? Because obviously, AIME is running a ton of different experiments, trying to figure out how we shift and move the needle, not only on the individual level, but then also, like you said, in that system level, but what are some things that have been working that have caught your attention? Or that you're particularly proud of? Or what would you say are some elements in the secret sauce?

Brenden Newton  12:30  
Yeah, good, good call. So I think number one, it's good to identify all these nuanced conversations and dive in and be open. Yeah, number two, it's good to actually jump in and make an impact now, because there are kids getting, you know, their lights switched off, there's, there's pain or suffering, there are health issues here. So getting active and doing something now, I think it's really important. What we've been able to do with AIME is establish a repeatable, scalable model between a group of those who come from a basically privileged background university students, and we've been able to mobilize them, train them, and set them free into a weekly engagement with minority school students in the periphery of their university. And we've not only done that on a couple of universities, but we've also done that across 350 schools, 40, universities, 25,000, minority, young people have gone through school based on our mentoring curriculum at the same rate as their non-marginalized peers, niches closing this crazy kind of supposedly impenetrable gap of educational equity. And I think the secret sauce here is actually putting people who are different, the university students that may not have these connections with these minority demographics and sitting them down having a two-way interaction, where most of the time the mentor actually, the mentor actually gets more out of it. Yeah, and there's this kind of, there's this connection, that is just it doesn't happen peer to peer doesn't happen teacher to the student doesn't happen. Mom to son, please. So yeah, having that repeatable, scalable model has allowed us to work with 25,000 students, and look to go 100,000 students by 2025, globally. And that's our aspiration. I think that repeatable model with your two big levers in the world, which are universities, and schools, putting them together with a repeatable system of engagement.

Scott Allen  14:30  
How does that so you'd mentioned Rio de Janeiro or a community in the United States with Native Americans? How does it work? Does this repeatable, scalable system work regardless of those different contexts? What's your experience been?

Brenden Newton  14:47  
Knowing that it's freedom within a framework? We provide a suppose a template Salesforce has worked with us to develop trails through the trailhead program, which initiates A leader who has been recruited by us and recommended locally as a representative of that minority community, who has the capacity to lead from a university level. So we identify a leader, we call them a president of imagination. And we walk them through these online tools. And then from there, they go, Okay, here are my tools, here's my frames. But now, here's my local context. Here's what makes schools and university students move in my local context, and they fit frame around that context. And there's added to the adaptability along the way. There's a local staff member, actually paid staff member on every country, there's that kind of degree of back and forth thing and coaching,

Scott Allen  15:44  
You're running experiments, and you are working to figure out what works in this context. And so that kind of failing fast and experimenting and seeing what works in this context, I think it's critical, right? Because you could call it an ill-defined problem and ill-structured problem, you could call it a wicked problem, you could call it an adaptive challenge. Regardless of what you call it, I don't know that any one person has the answer. So we're experimenting, we're trying to move the needle, right.

Brenden Newton  16:15  
100%, I think we fall into a dangerous space that particularly we were aspiring towards social change if we pretend we've got a model that will fit and stay for a decade. And that will, you know, that won't change and adapt and won't fail. We're so hell-bent on risk mitigation, sometimes in our structures, because you're kind of not adapting, and you're not, and you're not flexible enough, and you're not willing to lose

Scott Allen  16:40  
when you think about what needs to happen to achieve. Because you said was it 100,000? By was it 2024 2025?

Brenden Newton  16:50  
Yeah, 2025, we've set a goal for 100,000 School students transitioning through school at the same rate as their non-minority peers, are using the mentoring structure,

Scott Allen  17:00  
How can listeners engage, learn more? I'm going to ask you that question. But also just, I imagine that's just mobilizing 1000s of people around the world to become engaged to then go do the work, right. And AIME is kind of that catalyst, that platform, at least I have it in my mind is kind of that platform by which then to mobilize that army of people, right?

Brenden Newton  17:25  
Absolutely. And we know all people, most people actually want to make a change. But yeah, it's just a platform to make change within an in a trustworthy sense, that's proven. How can people activate that in their local area with their local institution? Well, it would be identifying leaders that have the capacity, for example, to become imagination, presidents, and then saying, "Hey, here's an opportunity for you...a learning and development opportunity of a lifetime where you get to mobilize a bunch of your friends as mentors, train them with structure and work with 100 minority young people, and have that impact over a 10 month period throughout your tertiary education."

Scott Allen  18:09  
I'm an imagination president. What does that look like on the local level? How does that work?

Brenden Newton  18:14  
Yeah, so if you're an imagination President on a local level, it means that you have put your hand up to become essentially a leader of a mentoring chapter in your local region, you've registered an AIME Society at your institution, you've taken the tools off the shelf, from AIME to recruit and train mentors from that institution, your peers, and then you've got a school agreement with a local school or a couple of local schools that have within them, the local demographic that you're wanting to work with. It might be African American, there might be LGBTQI, whatever demographic you've decided that you want to work with. And once that school agreement or MOU has is crossed off, you get permission notes distributed to the students that want to be involved, and it's a voluntary involvement. And then the kind of goal is that Iran a weekly mentoring session, where we've got some frame around that and some pedagogy and some activities that we offer the imagination president, as they go out with their mentors to that school once a week. And there's a period of time where we start and finish that. And the important aspect is that that mentor doesn't feel like that leader doesn't feel like they've got this ongoing role to coach kids through life. It's, got a clear start and a clear finish the idea that the kids become stronger, you know, after their interaction with us, rather than being coming dependent.

Scott Allen  19:49  
And talk a little bit about, let's say, one kind of piece of the curriculum. I'm going to drill down a little further what might a week's or a month's worth of curriculum look like? Are you talking about leadership? Are you talking about values? What's the, because I read on the website, the values of the organization, and they're incredible. And I'll put a link to that in the show notes so that people can see what it is that you stand for. It's a very noble aim, are those values then part of the curriculum? Or how does that work?

Brenden Newton  20:20  
Yeah, really good question. Sorry, I'm getting stuck on the framing of you're looking, you're looking for the actual activities. There are two modes for mentoring that we give to the imagination president, their interns, and their mentors. And number one, it's in school tutor squads, usually one hour blocks on a weekly basis where the kids sit in a room with the mentors, and they go through 15-minute blocks, 15 minutes, the first 15 minutes is usually called "failure time." And we've got a list of 500 activities that are relatively generic, where we encourage kids within that safe space to try something they may not have tried before. Okay, and it's very simple. But what they do is they neurologically develop that capacity to be uncomfortable, look like a fool, for example. And then to try again, you know, and I think that's, you know, if we look back at the rationale for that, it's super important, if you're a minority kid if you're any kid, but if you're a kid that's particularly had to wrestle through life, you put your hand up in school, and then if you get shot down by a peer, or teacher or whatever, you're never going to put that hand up again. And where were developing that resilience, that kind of neurological base for going, it's okay to fail. It's important. I fail every day. And I can be proud of who I am. Because failure doesn't, it doesn't actually determine who I am I have worth beyond that. Yeah. So that's failure time, the first 15 minutes. And there's a big kind of saying that we sort of sing around AIME is like "no shame at AIME." And like, there's no shame. And as soon as we sort of getaway that stigma of having shame and having to fit in, I think we're halfway there, you know. So that's part of value time. And then we jump into academic support. And so we're not curricular tutors. But we, from a mentoring perspective can develop that behavior of engaging with schoolwork. And we do that for 15 minutes with the kids, we open up what they're being challenged within mathematics, for example. And we have a run through their schoolwork and we go back and forth, we don't answer the questions. But we purely teach how to critically analyze a particular set of work and, and do that in a fun setting.

Scott Allen  22:44  
That's just now a half-hour failure time because my kids are 11 and 13. And if they asked me for help with math, then I'm, I'm in failure time without the skill!

Brenden Newton  22:56  
And that's the best way to be a teacher yet.

Scott Allen  22:59  
I say, "I don't know how to do this, let's figure it out."

Brenden Newton  23:03  
Cool. And then and then we wrap up with a little game called "The Gaime of Life" and what this game of life is called spelled "GAIME," you know, in relation to the organization. And it's, I'm not sure if you've played Dungeons and Dragons before, but it's the idea where you build a story. But the particular focus of these stories where people go round in a circle and add the next slice of the story, the focus of that group in that particular tutor sport, is to build a story, which promotes equality, which promotes imagination, and starts to unpack those principles of building a fairer world that sort of AIME is founded on so off the back of that we have video teams that pop into different continents and record the results of those particular game of live sessions. And what it does, it gets a kid to be able to create their narrative off the back of stimuli, like a two-minute video, which might be challenging.

Scott Allen  24:10  
Yeah, I love that. And there must be some really incredible examples out there that you've come across.

Brenden Newton  24:17  
Yeah, it's crazy. Because when you get a kid too, I mean, it happens with my four-year-old you. You ask him what a firefighter does, and you might get a fairly simple answer. But if you ask him to be a firefighter, he's marching around the backyard with his red hat on, you know, doing the hose in the garden, you know, like when we roleplay we actually step in, and I think it's the Bloom's taxonomy of pedagogy where you've got if you get told something you remember 10% of it if you have to repeat it back and you might remember 20% But if you have to roleplay it and actually play it out in real life, you're starting to think about like, you know, you're at 70% of that content in your mind, going through your veins. So that's the kind of rd. Educationally

Scott Allen  25:02  
as you think about your own role within this organization, what are your biggest challenges? I mean as you because you're working to influence people to be involved in AIME all around the world. That's That's leadership. Right? Talk a little bit about your journey with that work. The ups and downs, the challenges the winds, the as a leader trying to influence others to do this good work around the world. What are you bumping up against?

Brenden Newton  25:31  
Cool, thanks, man. I appreciate it. Um, rejections? Probably the hardest thing to swallow on a daily basis, people saying no, I'm not interested. I think you're kidding yourself. I think you're arrogant. I need you to leave me alone, those kinds of things, which is all fine. And that's something that I've learned in my own personal awareness. Is that only a projection of, of what that person is experiencing in terms of discomfort? And, and that's fine, but it's not that easy at the moment.

Scott Allen  26:00  
No, it's not.

Brenden Newton  26:03  
Yeah, I have trouble. Yeah, we ongoing, kind of, because, realistically, there's only one in 100 people out of all the conversations I have that really stand up and say, yep, I'm going to walk with you. Let's do this. And that's so much joy. And I try to suck the joy out of that, you know, there's plenty of that. But it's also Yeah, it's

Scott Allen  26:28  
hard. Work, right? I mean, yeah, I have great respect, I really, and that's,

Brenden Newton  26:33  
and that's why you can see my video, I've got a treadmill over there. I've got a weight bench. I've got a yoga mat. And, you know, it's about keeping the, you know, the anatomy alive so that you don't sink into sort of this kind of anxiety about rejection.

Scott Allen  26:52  
Yes. You know, that's such an interesting thing, whether it's in my world when I'm rejected, whether it's a paper that was submitted, or it was some kind of ask that didn't follow the didn't occur, or it's a really interesting game to reframe, rejection, to reframe, because you can, it's very easy to make it all about kind of you and you're not good enough. But putting yourself out there. There's a US coach, basketball coach, his name was John Wooden. And, you know, he said something to the effect, I'll put in the show notes the quote, but it was "doers make mistakes and fail. And I'm pretty sure if you're failing, you're a doer." Right? You stay in the game. It's I have great respect. So that's, so that's a challenge. What are some of those? What are some of those joys of leading in part, this initiative? And bringing it to the world? Again? Like maybe that 100 fills the tank back up?

Brenden Newton  27:52  
Yeah, no, that's beautiful. Well, there's, I love when I get to, one of the most satisfying things is in particularly over this conversation is then able to reflect on Yeah, might have been painful, for a lot of the time for the last couple of years, for example, but how beautiful it is that I can have gained a sense of self-awareness that I don't plummet to, you know, the deepest depths of hell, every time someone tells me no or so having reflected just over the last half an hour, just that there is learning, there is changes happening within myself, which is, that's something to celebrate. Yeah. And for sure, for sure. Right. Maybe I can pass that on to my kids, you know, and a lot of other things you can talk about in terms of our impact on 1000s of kids, and potentially where they might go and do their lives. And you get a couple of case studies that are just so heartwarming, but I suppose I stay alive with that idea that I'm learning and I'm excited about the game every day going to kind of work and connecting with different people, particularly, you know, in a new country, a new imagination president. And there's, there's plenty of energy there. And,

Scott Allen  29:02  
you know, I had a fairly significant rejection in the last couple of weeks. And what you just said really resonated for me because it was an opportunity for me to even say to my kids, okay, that didn't happen, and kind of model how to go for something, but still appreciate when it didn't work out, go for something, and still learn and feel good about myself when it didn't work out. Because even I mean, how old are your kids?

Brenden Newton  29:35  
Yeah, they're four and seven. Okay. So

Scott Allen  29:38  
yeah, I mean, it gets to the point where now they're trying out for teams, they're trying out for parts and musicals, they're, they're putting themselves out there. And there's such wonderful learning in some of that. I mean, given your background in competitive sports, I mean, it's part of the gig

Brenden Newton  29:58  
100% And I think and deeper than sports, you know, sports is a fairly out-there arbitrary concept. I know it's very sensual in the American and Australian psyche. But one of the more important things is like when, when someone, our spouse maybe gets upset at us, how do we handle that? You know, do we see their perspective? And that's one of the hardest things in the world. But I mean, probably one of the most beautiful things in the world do we can lose the grand final and somehow recover from that. But can we recover from an argument? Can we recover from, you know? Yeah, that that's the good stuff, man. As Robin Williams would say, in Goodwill Hunting, it's there, the peccadilloes there the

Scott Allen  30:44  
good stuff. Yeah. Such a good film, as you think about your work. What do people need to know about working with individuals in these communities? What do people need to know? What have you learned about working with, with folks in, say, the indigenous communities in Australia,

Brenden Newton  31:03  
uh, probably, the first thing I'd say is, this inequity is multi-generational. And I know everyone knows that. But really, unpacking the trauma of a community and a demographic takes a long time. And to remember that, maybe a whole lifetime, and maybe you'll get nowhere in a whole lifetime. But you will have opened or peeled some layers of the onion. And, and just to be content in that. And I think that's coming back to, you know, be content in urine self-development, and self-awareness as the byproduct of your work, any other big picture stuff, or great change or educational attainment rates, you know, they're an add on. So that would be my kind of sentiment, you know, the idea that, for example, in the Australian story, 788, we have colonization and disregard for the current humanity that was here. And then from that, there was, you know, Aboriginal people looped into missions or groups, by church groups and told to live in a certain way and wear certain clothes and asked not to speak their language and then removed from their families because of the color of their skin to try to breed the "black" out of them. And that's sort of happened 450 years. And then over the last sort of 50 years, we've come up with some ideas of how to how to bridge that gap and how to support and stuff like that. But then we wonder why we suddenly, you know, are not making traction within a couple of years of starting a not for profit, for example, as we look at that chronology, we can see clearly that we just need to wait and listen, you know, gently empower and build some platforms for them to lead and lead their own change.

Scott Allen  32:52  
Well, I've been having this conversation with some folks lately, and it's a thought experiment. So for listeners, this is not a hard opinion, or it's not a well-formulated thought, but you know, the question is part of our work as human beings. I, I'm fairly confident that this is part of that work that we have to focus on as humanity is, I think, since the founding of humans, Homo sapiens, we have crawled on the backs of others to make progress, whether that's the Egyptians, whether that's the Greeks, whether that's the Romans, whether that's in the United States, in this context, and can we evolve to a place as a species, where we provide as many people as possible, that base level opportunity to thrive, and however, they're supposed to be here to thrive? And move away from some of that way of being that kind of brings us to this place where we are right now. Right

Brenden Newton  34:07  
now? 100%? That's a beautiful, big thought. So, so rich might, and if this podcast gets no listens whatsoever, us having this 20 seconds right now. Yeah, let it be that.

Scott Allen  34:22  
Yeah. Because I think, you know, I think that's the work. That's the work of the human race. And if we can't do that, I think it's going to, we're going to be limited in what we can accomplish as a species. For sure. I think there has to be an evolution of and it sounds like and I'm kind of come back now to aim, where we're talking about unlikely connections where we're talking about building bridges where we're talking about building relationships with folks engaging in failure time engaging in a quick mentoring around the schooling and the education and It's invaluable. And again, to your point, probably the folks who are serving as mentors are getting just as much out of this experience, if not more because their eyes are opening to they're evolving. They're developing. They're growing/

Brenden Newton  35:16  
Yeah, yeah. 100% They go on to take the leadership roles in the organization's they're the new Google CEOs, they're new, you know, bits and pieces and now make decisions informed by their interaction in that room 10 times, you know, back on a tertiary degree, and that's the idea.

Scott Allen  35:35  
Okay, Brandon, I always close out the podcast by asking what you've been reading, watching, streaming, listening to consuming, and it could have something to do with what we've just discussed, or could have nothing to do with. So in your world in adjacent space would be snowboarding that's adjacent. I'm not saying it's anywhere near but it's fascinating. I watched this documentary The other night on Burton, the founder of Burton Snowboards. Have you watched that? It's on HBO? I

Brenden Newton  36:06  
haven't but I can imagine snowboarders the coolest people on the planet.

Scott Allen  36:09  
Oh my gosh, it...I was in tears watching this documentary about the founder of Burton Snowboards. So that's really kind of caught my eye in recent days. What's something that's really caught your attention?

Brenden Newton  36:24  
Oh, man, I love this stuff. So I don't know how I stumbled upon it. It was about a year ago, I was flicking through my iBooks app. And I was looking for an edgy kind of audiobook to dig into. And I really don't know how I stumbled upon it. But I'm so thankful I did. I've done probably 200 hours of listening to this series over and over. So it was written by a guy named Robert Muchamore. Okay, I think he's a British guy. But the narrative is so compelling for me personally, and I'll take a quick shot at breaking it down. There's a young boy who is, you know, he and his sister go to school, they have a really tough time at school, they get bullied, they've had a really hard life, their mom sort of spends all day on the couch, she's very sick and ill and has an ulcer on her leg and is on medication for that and a lot of complications but she runs a, a theft business. Basically, she sends people out to steal things, and she sort of sells them in the black market. And she does all this from a telephone. She comes home, this particular character from for a difficult day at school, he's been bullied, it's just horrible. And he's just, life's not good. And he comes home and that night is his stepdad who's trouble, comes over with some drinks and feeds him to his mom, and he wakes up the next morning and you know, normal day, and Susie's mom has died because she's had too much drink with the medication. And he is suddenly forced to go to an orphanage. He's at this orphanage. This kid. He's got this incredible capacity for mathematics. He just naturally has this ability to kind of take in numbers and bring out the solution, as said not dissimilar to will and Good Will Hunting. Yeah. And he's also a young boy and he's 11 years old. He's got a hunger for, you know, adrenaline, and he gets caught up with these kids at the orphanage to go and steal some stuff or get chased properly. So just you know, just innocent foreigners just want fun and he wants some friends and you know, it gets caught up the wrong crowd ends up in the police station one night and the actual police are in cahoots with EMI five, which is a spy agency. And then actually they've got a child spy agency that's completely underground that no one knows about. And they're actually quite ethical too. They give kids who have the capacity of intelligence and have a hunger for adrenaline the chance to be trained. While he goes on into this spy journey lives on the spy campus for kids have all these beautiful friends and there's intelligence going from the kid that got bullied at school. He becomes such a beautiful spy and gets in quite a quagmire of difficult drug lords and uncovers them by befriending the children etc. And it's just a beautiful story of acknowledging that genius in someone that hasn't been acknowledged before and I've been running that every night. I'm even reading it to my six-year-old now.

Scott Allen  39:41  
What's the series called?

Brenden Newton  39:43  
It's called CHERUB. That's an acronym for Charles Henderson's Espionage Research Unit B or something like that. It's Wow, yeah, that was a long answer. But man, that series is crazy.

Scott Allen  40:00  
I love it. I love it, man. I love it. Well, Brandon, thank you for the good work that you do. Thanks for being out there every day and trying to make a difference and make the world a better place. It's very, very much appreciated. How can people get in touch with you and an AIME?

Brenden Newton  40:17  
Yeah, so this on the website, there's an inquiry line. The AIME website is https://aimementoring.com. And my name is Brenden Newton and it's shout out that you want to chat to Brenden on the inquiries line and then pa will swing it through

Scott Allen  40:39  
that's awesome. Okay, sir. Be well, thank you so much for spending some time with me today.

Brenden Newton  40:45  
Yeah, thanks for making time for me night. I really appreciate you taking the time to chat. 

Scott Allen  40:50  
Okay. Be well. 

Okay, everyone, Happy New Year. So much respect for the work that Brenden's doing if leadership is the process of influencing others towards a common vision or mobilizing others towards a common vision. Here is an individual who is each and every day doing that work and trying to make the world a better place trying to create opportunity, and leading bottom line leading, I would encourage you to explore their website and I will put all of that information in the show notes, so you can learn how you can get more involved. And Brenden, thank you so much, sir, for the work that you do. For me, the practical wisdom and all of this is to ensure that you have something in your life that you're giving back to that's feeding you and not only feeding you but making the world a better place. So that sounds like a win-win to me. Now, I hope that this is a special moment for you. Because I know she's excited. We have someone who is looking forward to wishing you a happy new year. Everyone. This is Emily Allen. 

Emily Allen  42:00  
Have an awesome 2022!

Scott Allen  42:02  
Okay, be well everyone. Thanks as always for listening in. Take care

Transcribed by https://otter.ai