Dr. Theo Dawson - Something You Can Practice

Theo Linda Dawson, Ph.D. (U.C. Berkeley, 1998) is the Executive Director of Lectica, Inc. Dr. Dawson—a recovering serial entrepreneur whose mid-life crisis led to an advanced degree in human development—has practiced midwifery, run several businesses, taught at Harvard and Hampshire College, published numerous peer-reviewed academic articles, and received several awards for her developmental research.  

During the last 25 years, Dawson and her colleagues—using novel developmental research methods—have created (1) a powerful approach to measuring learning & development, (2) several written response assessments that measure the complexity level of real-world skills, (3) a universal learning model (VCoL+7™), and (4) a fundamental learning practice (Micro-VCoLing™) that optimizes skill development. She and her team are dedicated to ensuring that humans of all ages have an opportunity to realize their full developmental potential by making these tools freely available to anyone who teaches the world’s children.

Quotes From This Episode

• "We define skills as 'something you can practice.'"
• "The dopamine/opioid cycle is a cycle in the brain (probably from a natural perspective, most used for learning and love). It is the fundamental process that supports learning... you get a certain amount of satisfaction from that periodic achievement."
• "The highest level thinkers are the people with an enormous amount of experience and expertise - plus more diverse expertise."
• "We should not be privileging that the academy is the way to learn at all. We should actually be prioritizing expertise... the ability to build skill over time to the point where you have expertise."

Resources Mentioned In This Episode

• VUCA Unpacked #1 - Introduction
• VUCA Unpacked #2 - Collaborative Capacity
• VUCA Unpacked #3 - Perspective Coordination
• VUCA Unpacked #4 - Contextual Thinking
• VUCA Unpacked #5 - Design Making Process

About The International Leadership Association (ILA)

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Transcript

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

Scott Allen  0:02  
Okay, everyone, welcome to the Phronesis podcast. Thanks for checking in wherever you are in the world. Today. I have Dr. Theo Dawson. She is the executive director of Lectica, Inc. Dr. Dawson, a recovering serial entrepreneur, whose midlife crisis led to an advanced degree in human development has practiced midwifery run several businesses, taught at Harvard and Hampshire College, published numerous peer-reviewed academic articles, and received several awards for her developmental research. During the last 25 years, Theo and her colleagues using novel developmental research methods have created a powerful approach to measuring learning and development to several written response assessments that measure the complexity level of real-world skills. Three, a universal learning model VCoL+7 (and we'll learn about that). And for a fundamental learning practice micro-VCoLing that optimizes skill development, she and her team are dedicated to ensuring that humans of all ages have an opportunity to realize their full developmental potential. By making these tools freely available to anyone who teaches the world's children. I came across Theo when she was in conversation with Jonathan Reams and Peter Senge. And it was a video where I just, I thought, this is a person who is really going to be interesting to have a conversation with, and then I went to some of her writing, and I believe the first piece I read was, and I'll put the link to this in the show notes, Theo,  was your writing about VUCA. And that was on medium. And I thought, Whoa, she has a very, very cool mind, I need to have a conversation with her. Theo, how did you get this cool mind? Where did that come from?

Theo Dawson  2:00  
Strife!

Scott Allen  2:03  
Strife? I love it. Obviously, you have a passion for this space of learning. Have you always had that passion? Where does that curiosity come from? What's the source? What do you think?

Theo Dawson  2:19  
Well, I've always had a personal passion for learning and was fortunate enough to be able to keep it. Which, you know,  I was a midwife for many, many years. And every baby I ever met, had a passion for learning. But somehow, the world tends to have its way with our passion for learning. And it gets lost along the way for a lot of people. But I always say I was in that 20% of people for whom schooling was kind of right there, and what you might call the Goldilocks Zone, where I could learn things well enough to be able to take them and go play with the ideas and put them to work. And I think that that's where we'd really like everybody to be able to be. And so my sense of the joy of learning, and you know, how much the satisfaction, being a learner and being someone who can get that sense of mastery that comes from taking what you're learning and putting it to work gives to me, I want to share it with the rest of the world. And I guess it started with sharing it with my children and trying to figure out what would be an optimal learning environment for them when they were born. And then observed in my midwifery practice, how education was affecting other children. And then I burnt out, here's part of the strife I burned out of the midwifery practice and ended up going and working in a building an advertising business in Los Angeles, Hollywood of all places.

And just living that kind of, I called it my time in the real world, you know, just seeing how the world operates. And understanding that better. And then finally, deciding, this is just not enough. There's not enough learning in this for me, there's not enough growth in this for me and sent me back to school. And I ended up at UC Berkeley, being the only person admitted into the human development program that year, which was kind of weird.

And having just a wonderful team of people who, once they could see, you know, the, my basic skills, basically, let me do whatever I wanted to do while I was there. So I had an amazing graduate experience at UC Berkeley and ended up really reviving that passion that I had for my children, and began to really want that for all children. And I could see that the way that education was going at the time was moving further and further away from making it possible for all children to have the kind of experience with learning that I had had. So yes, it feels to me, like stealing someone's birthright when you take that away from them.  And we must stop, period.

Scott Allen  5:03  
Well, I want to start really kind of at the fundamentals if we could, because I think in this video that I watched with you and Peter Sangay and Jonathan Rames, you said something that just, it's the simplest definition I've ever heard. And it was beautiful. And again, I mean, I, I'm almost 50 years old, I should have heard this by now, or this should have hit me this easily, especially given the space that I'm in. But you say we define skills as "something you can practice" is simple, easy. Can you give me some other just core definitions of just foundational definitions of how you think about this space? These are something you can practice? Are there other things that, yes, you have simplified to that essence? Because I want to know...

Theo Dawson  5:57  
Well, you shouldn't feel too bad about not stumbling across this before it took us many years of research, to do enough observations for that to become rather obvious. And of course, as soon as something obvious becomes obvious, it's a "no dah." And you wonder, why did it take so many years? To get to this? No, da,

Scott Allen  6:17  
You know, definitions for competencies, skills, etc.  There are all these words, that I don't think we even have clarity around or shared understanding, which then makes this so incredibly difficult.

Theo Dawson  6:33  
It's really hard, right? Yeah, it's really hard. And this is true of all words, there is no word for which everyone has the same meaning. If you're a developmental researcher, that's one of the first things you learn you cannot trust words. Oh, you have to look deeper for meaning. Yes. So that is, it's interesting, because you kind of hit the nail on the head, we started out at the very beginning, teaching everybody about development, because we thought I thought in my naivete, that everybody would immediately learn about development, and then understand it the way that I did, and be able to put it to work right away in useful ways. But that turns out not to be true not trying to teach people about development, it's complex, and it took me many years of graduate school to understand it adequately. And even today, I'm still learning more and more about what it means. So only a few people in the world are going to do that and get to that level of understanding of something. So you know, about halfway through this journey, I woke up one day, and I thought, that's not what we should be focusing on. We should be focusing on things people can do - things that people can do now with as little training as possible. And that's when we began the journey of coming up with small, simple things that we can have quite a bit of shared meaning around because they didn't require learning a whole bunch of stuff that you can put to work in your life or that we can put to work and assessments or an assessment reports that support development. So development is the goal. But the actions and the language are all about the doing. Okay, so, so we've created a lot of things that we've given our own names to, because we don't want the names to compete with other understandings of the names that are also very simple ideas. So we have this notion of the "virtuous cycle of learning,", which is based on work that John Piaget did way back in the 1940s, and 50s, where he was trying to really understand the mechanism of how we built knowledge over time and now is increasingly supported by the neurosciences, where a ton of work is coming out that really supports almost everything that he's said about how this process works. And it's basically the idea that there's a kind of a cycle through which we learn in which as we bring new information, and we either can fit it into what we already know really well, like, you just plug it into lots of things you already know, or we have to kind of rearrange what we know to make sense of it, so we have to make a kind of new meaning. To make sense of it that we don't already have, we can't just plug it in easily. And that the way that all of this happens is through a process. That's a kind of cyclic process, where every time we encounter new information or a new experience, it's getting curated, in a way and, and this is happening automatically. So when a baby's learning to walk, you can see that in action. I've got some beautiful videos of kids discovering mirrors for the first time, for example, where you can watch tiny experiments that they're doing to figure out what's happening in the environment. Which is just it's astounding to see that mechanism is that built-in mechanism for learning, which we now call the "dopamine/opioid cycle." It's not kind of driving this.

Scott Allen  10:09  
About that real quick. Let's detour there for a moment.

Theo Dawson  10:12  
Okay, so the dopamine/opioid cycle is a cycle in the brain, probably maybe, from a natural perspective, most used for learning and love.

Scott Allen  10:23  
Okay? It makes sense.

Theo Dawson  10:25  
I'm not an expert on the love side of it. There's some really compelling evidence, and it plays a major role in love,

Scott Allen  10:31  
you're an expert in the results of the love side, your midwifery!

Theo Dawson  10:37  
Consequences. And it is also the fundamental process that supports learning and how it works. It's just this wonderful, magical kind of dynamic that I think is gorgeous, is that we have this, a kind of a cycle that involves alternating dopamine and opioid. So the dopamine they call the striving hormone.  Dopamine is the drive process. And then, interestingly enough, if and only if we have success often enough, which also means that we have failed often enough, then that will drive the release of dopamine optimally, which releases the opioid. So you get a certain amount of satisfaction from that periodic achievement. If you achieve every single time, you stop getting satisfaction and want more and more of whatever it is. So that's, that's addiction.

Scott Allen  11:37  
You know, what you're making me think of, because I literally, I'm working on an article right now where we are working with a woman who's an expert in games - that's what's happening, right? That's exactly what's happening when someone's playing a game and being rewarded and the next level and rewarded and...

Theo Dawson  11:57  
and games recruit games recruited really well. Advertising recruits it really well. Facebook recruits it really well. Yeah, everything in our world recruits it except our educational system. The professional system...

Scott Allen  12:15  
kills it! there's no dopamine or opioids, there's just...

Theo Dawson  12:17  
There are two ways to kill it. One, you make learning boring by making people just mostly memorize a lot of stuff really fast. Or causing people to win too often or fail too often and providing extrinsic rewards rather than letting the intrinsic cycle do its job. So we're basically training people to go looking for extrinsic rewards in our educational system, which is really it's a, it's total, it's a total disaster for our development as human beings. And I think we're seeing many of the consequences of the acceleration of that with high stakes testing in the United States 20 years ago; we're seeing it now. Like we're really seeing effects with it now. And we've been researching in that area. But anyway, so the dopamine opioid cycle makes babies learn to walk. Even though they fall down and really hurt themselves a lot, usually, because of the reward, that system is set up so that the reward happens just often enough. So the babies are rarely going to try anything that's so much too difficult for them that they're going to always fail, and they're not going to see incremental progress, right? So we already know how to do this.  We were born knowing how to do this. And the result of this cycle in the, in the physical world of the early word of the world of a child with a more physical, simple social world of a child, is that every little kid who's got a human normal environment learns to do a whole bunch of things like talking and walking.

Scott Allen  13:54  
And oftentimes there are, there's the internal, but there's also someone in their external environment saying, Yay, good job. And they're getting that too, right.

Theo Dawson  14:04  
They're also getting that in the love. Right? So love is, is definitely in here. It's a matter of fact, if the love is not there, the development doesn't happen. So there's so this cycle is just so important. It's so intrinsically important. And we let it fall out of education. For you know, Kurt Fischer was convinced that literally only 20% of kids were able to stay in it during the educational process, and it may be fewer. I don't know if that's that's a ballpark estimate on his part; I think experiential rather than specific evidence-based, but we're observing something similar to that in our research as well. So as a consequence, we decided that we needed to reteach people how to do that.

Scott Allen  14:50  
I like it! I'm in!

Theo Dawson  14:51  
and that's where micro-VCoLing comes in. Because babies are doing micro-VCoLing, but they're doing an unconscious version of it. It's driven specifically by physiological structures that are built into the brain, we also know that as we develop, our world becomes more abstract and complex. And the way that, our unconscious brain, you know, pulls information together and connects it all up can often be suboptimal, not perfect because we have these biases. And the biases are designed for a more physical simple world they're not; they're not really designed for the complexity of abstract thought. So what we do is we teach people not only how to go back to getting the dopamine opioid cycle going again, but we teach them how to run the cycle so that they become the master of how the connections get made in their brain. And we do that with a simple thing where you set a goal, gather some information, there's usually some kind of information you might pull together, even if it's just stuff you already know, gather some information, you know, reflect about what it is you're going to do to achieve the goal. And then take action, you practice, do practice, do something. And then after you have done the action, a conscious very quick evaluation. Okay, how well you didn't want you to do better next time. And it sounds really simple, but we've been teaching it for a while. And it actually can be quite difficult for people to learn to do this, especially if they've been trained that learning stuff. Like...learning is about learning stuff. It's it can be quite challenging. But we're having quite a bit of success. And the course that we offer, where we teach people how to do this has built a lot of momentum over the last, it's only been around for a little over a year. And it's already built quite a bit of momentum. So

Scott Allen  16:43  
It is interesting in some of my work; I might have a conversation about a very, very simple problem-solving model. And the participants are whether it's a CEO or an eighth-grader looking at you. "Yes. Uh-huh. Right, I got it. Yep, get it? Yep, that's easy." Then you put a shiny object in front of them in some type of task, and everything's out the window. So that's my, that's my attempt at agreeing with you. And that shifting how the brain thinks about and engages in these cycles is, it's hard work, it's hard work.

Theo Dawson  17:23  
It feels like it was shifting the way we think is hard work. But micro-VCoLing is easy because we're built to do it. So once people get they click into it, it just takes over, and their life, total life changes. It's one of those truly transformative things; everything looks different once you learn how to do it. And in any, because you're doing it at the moment in real-time, the practice becomes automated, and it becomes a very easy kind of learning to do, where you don't feel like you're expending a lot of extra effort. It's just naturally part of the process. But I want to go back to what you were saying about you teaching people some stuff. And then when it comes to doing, they can't do it, you know, for a very long time we've privileged academic learning. So in schools, you rarely build skills around the things you learn. If you're doing any skill-building at all, it's not at a very shallow level, and you never really get any kind of expertise. So think of the labs, the science labs, just really, you're doing experiments that somebody else designed, it's got an outcome that if you don't get it, right, you're gonna fail. That's, that's not the kind of practice I'm talking about...

Scott Allen  18:31  
or in the context of like a college of business, we do. Let's say it's a negotiation segment, and you do one 30-minute exercise. And then that was the

Theo Dawson  18:41  
Yeah, exactly. And when you negotiate constantly, all the time, through that entire program, right? We've got some major evidence if you want to be skilled at it. And I would like to have a chance to talk about it at some point, but we create this illusion that we have learned something and have expertise when we have no capability. And so what we say is that there's a kind of learning hierarchy. So there's just plain memorizing, so I can spit this formula back out, I can spit these words back out, I can give you the definition. There's learning with understanding. So there's getting it at an academic level, like okay, these things fit together, I can see how they fit together. I've got a mental model of this that's fairly robust. But we say that's not yet quite learning. So, real learning is when you take that thing you're learning and learn how to put it to work in the world. That's where your brain gets connected. That's where you have that embodied learning experience that recruits all of you into the process. That's, you can still ride a bicycle even if you stop for 20 years kind of learning, you know?

Scott Allen  19:55  
And I love that phrasing, "recruits all of you into the process."

Theo Dawson  19:59  
Yes. So it is your emotional self. It's your sensory self. So it's your kinesthetic self. And it is your conscious mind driving the way we've created the model; it is the conscious mind that's kind of driving it. And instead of letting the system, one just network anything's how it wants to. We're constantly saying, "is that the way we want to remember this?"

Scott Allen  20:25  
When you say system one, are you going to Kahneman right there?

Theo Dawson  20:28  
I'm going to Kahneman Yeah, yeah. So if and I don't think the brain is quite divided up exactly this way. But it's a wonderful heuristic. Yeah. So if you think of the system as your executive brain, I'm the conscious part of you. And I'm deciding things and thinking about stuff. You think of system one as the network. You think of information coming in it most of the time; when we have information coming in, if we don't add a micro-VCoL, it's just coming in. And system one is just networking based on its standard protocols, the way that it would ordinarily network it. So if you already have a bias in a certain direction, bam, that's where it's gonna get connected, gone. That's just the nature of the brain. Yeah, yeah. So if you're engaging in micro-VCoLing as a, you know, as an older child or an adolescent or an adult, you're after you do the action, if you do the practice, you're thinking, how did that go - consciously? And that's your chance to break down useless connections and build up new ones; that's your chance.

Scott Allen  21:35  
So micro-VCoLing would almost be a habit of mind. Correct?

Theo Dawson  21:40  
It's, becomes a habit of mine. And once it becomes my habit, you're learning all the time. You're learning all the time from everything. There are some skills involved that you have to learn to habituate to make that all work. But once you've got that, once the trains roll, it just keeps rolling. And in a sense, you are addicted. And the finest sense, you become addicted because that dopamine/opioid cycle works for you. And when it's when you're doing little tiny things, or you know, tiny skills, it gives you a sense of satisfaction, when all of a bunch of skills that you've building for a long time comes together with another skill and is that explosion of insight, you get a eureka moment.

Scott Allen  22:27  
In a very beautiful way, you have broken these things down into mega, macro, mini, and micro.  Is right now an appropriate time to talk about that?

Theo Dawson  22:44  
Yes, well, you're talking about our skill maps. Yeah, we have a very particular way of approaching skills we look at what would be considered a skill normally, like what people would call a skill. And usually, what we call skills is usually a collection of skills that work together to end. And we break those down into smaller and smaller and smaller skills until we get to the tiniest skill. Yes, a tiny skill is called a micro skill. And its definition is a skill you can practice at the moment, in real-time. Okay. All right. So what is a micro skill for you in a particular skill area might be a macro skill for somebody else. They'd have to break it down even further to be able to do it in real-time. So just for an example, take a decision-making process that you're using. Once you've mastered or become a virtuoso in a particular decision. We like virtuosos because virtuosos never really get to mastery like they're always. So we like that term. If you are a virtuoso, we're approaching virtuosity and decision making, doing the whole decision-making process. This is a micro skill because you can do the whole thing in real-time. For another person, we would have to break it down into tiny, tiny little pieces to give them the tiny little skills that ended up working together to create that larger skill. So micro skill is not something you can point at, and that's always a micro skill. Because it's relative to the context and it's relative to the individual's level of skill. It's easy and complex at the same time. In our assessment development for providing feedback on assessment, we're always trying to figure out how to tailor this feedback to this particular learner who's demonstrated a particular skill level in these various areas. And that led us to start to think about skills in this way. And then, when we were building the new website with the latest version of all of our assessments over the last couple of years, it occurred to me that it wouldn't hurt to share the skill maps that we were using to build the site with the public at large because you But that was something I thought a lot of people who just grab hold of and go and run with, without learning anything else. Like if they just had that, that would help them. And it's turned out to be the case. I think that our most popular article of all time it's the one that talks about the collaborative capacity skill set. And people have taken it and run with it. Teachers have written to us, and coaches and consultants have told us what they're doing with it. And school principals are asking us how I can make this alive in my classroom? So

Scott Allen  25:32  
When you think about even approaching, let's see, so let's go down like I'll put a link to this in the show notes. Let's think about "collaborative capacity" right now. How do you then operationalize the micro-skills? Are they are they? Is it the curriculum of life, so to speak again? Is it me learning to V-Col, and then seeing this everywhere? And then once I see that micro skill, I build upon that? How do you operationalize it from a curricular standpoint?

Theo Dawson  26:05  
Well, I believe that there are probably many ways to do this. Sure. And a lot of different places to come in from. Yeah, so I don't want to give. I think that way about everything because you'll notice I'm not creating a standard curriculum. I'm not doing that. As a matter of fact, I will be doing a debrief of one of our assessments today. You know, the person's asking, "what's the right way to do this? "And I'm like, No, there's not a right way to do this, this is your way to do this my way. So we really, what usually happens is that people, let's say you're starting with the math, people look at the map, and they go, Oh, my gosh, those skills over there, I could still use those that work this week. Like, I really want to build those...those are really important to me right now. And so they operate operationalizing, there would be that we would provide them with some beginning micro-VCoLs that have been written up already for some of those skills, each of which is, you know, we have a few basic models are micro-VCoLs, and we plug different things into them. And depending upon what the skill is, we would have several of them that have already been created. And we're constantly creating new ones to fill any gaps, but we give them a lot of support. We say here, do this, do these four steps, and do them over and over and over again. And that might be their entry point for someone else; they might come and take our VIP course where we teach V-CoLing. And we literally teach people how to V-Col, not about V-CoLing

Scott Allen  27:38  
Yes, build this, right. And

Theo Dawson  27:42  
That's a great place to start. Because once you've got skills already, we give you a V-Col, and you can be more and better at it sooner. So it's just another way to get in other people find it just very, very difficult to get there, get loose enough or comfortable enough to be able to try something new and learn. And this is often because of learning trauma that they have had as a consequence of how the system rewards us.

Scott Allen  28:08  
Interesting. Define that for me real quick. 

Theo Dawson  28:12  
you know about impostor syndrome. 

Scott Allen  28:16  
Yeah! I'm a host of a podcast; I get it!

Theo Dawson  28:18  
I think that many people, who have gone through our school system in the last 20 years, and even before that, but even more so in the last 20 years, have really been so focused on grades and test scores as their goal of learning and staying at a and staying at the top and being able to get into college and all of that stuff as their main way of thinking about education and learning that they're terrified to be seen as falling below that ideal. Yeah. And to be able to learn, you have to take risks!

Scott Allen  28:58  
and fail, and you have to be vulnerable!

Theo Dawson  29:01  
Right, exactly. But after someone's been told, "No, you may never fail, you will be punished. You will not be able to participate in society if you fail!" After being told that over and over and over and over again. There's a real terror that people feel, and a lot of people who have been schooled like that will literally if I ask people, What does it feel like when you almost understand something? Someone like me would say, "Woohoo! Let's go!" Someone who has been traumatized in that way will say, "shame." Talk about motivation; nothing motivates us so well, shame.

Scott Allen  29:45  
How can I get more?

Theo Dawson  29:49  
So when people come to us, and they're up against that, we want to create a safe place for them to fail. And one of the reasons we have the micro-VCoL is that you can do a lot of micro-VCoLing and private, get clicked into your dopamine/opioid cycle and the reward system, and get comfortable there before you have to expose yourself to others. And so we're trying to have an inroad for everybody into this work. And of course, we have a bunch of people who are trained to work with our assessments, and every one of them is working in a different sector with different kinds of people, different age groups. And they're learning a lot about the differences between people and what works and doesn't. Eventually, we'll know enough to say, you know, here's a good plan for someone who's got this kind of approach. And here's a good plan. We're not there...

Scott Allen  30:43  
I said this yesterday, I think to conclude a podcast, I just love speaking with someone who's an expert in whatever they're an expert in; we have this gentleman in our life, who is an expert at walking around our house, telling us exactly what that plant is, and when it needs to be pruned and what we need to do to help it thrive. Love it. Cool. Awesome. Yes, I have insane respect for you that you know that. And then I might be interacting with someone else who, you know, the gentleman at Christopher Newport University, Jonathan White, who's just an expert in Abraham Lincoln, he will move into quotes from speeches in the course of a dialogue, I'm in let's have I love that. I believe that that thing is in everyone. I don't care if it's gaming, I don't care if it's snowboarding, I don't care if it's art. I don't care if it's engineering. I believe that's in everyone.

Theo Dawson  31:43  
I think you're onto something. And we've just we've stumbled upon this ourselves. We measured the complexity and people's thinking along a developmental continuum. And when we first started, it was pretty much assumed by everybody that the highest-level thinkers were the academics, but we have not found it to be true at all. It's not true!

The highest-level thinkers are the people with an enormous amount of experience and expertise. And it's always people with enormous experience and expertise, plus more diverse expertise. So someone swam in more than one pool but did it at a deep level. Those are the creators like those people are the ones who have; they just have ideas in their brains that can bump up against one another and come up with new ideas. So it's not the Academy. We should not be privileging the academy as the way to learn; we should prioritize expertise. So the ability to build skill over time to the point where you have expertise.

Scott Allen  32:59  
It's a way, but it's not the only way.

Theo Dawson  33:03  
It's a kind of expertise. You put it in its place. But it's not "the" way. And you know, when they say people who can't do teach, I don't think that's completely accurate. I mean, I'm sure there are a lot of people who teach who can also do it, but that is the way it's divided up. Yeah, we divided up that way. I'm one of the very few people who's both a doer and a teacher. And people want to either put me into the academic box or they want to put me into the business box. My academic colleagues put me in the doer box. And the Doer's put me in the academic.

Scott Allen  33:43  
This means you're probably doing well!

Theo Dawson  33:47  
But, ideally, all of us live differently; we don't live in a box; we take part in many kinds of boxes. Yep. That the expertise that we build becomes broader and more networked. And that just makes our ability to think, do, and interact. And it just builds all of those skills.

Scott Allen  34:09  
I think you're absolutely correct. There are too many folks out there who that's not their lived reality right now that they're waking up. And they're excited about what they're going to do today, feeling that there's value in what they're doing today. And I think how we teach is a piece of that conversation for sure. Theo, thank you so much. I appreciate your time today, and I appreciate the good work that you do. I will put all kinds of links in the show notes so listeners can access what you're up to. Is there a way you'd like people to connect with you?

Theo Dawson  34:46  
The easiest way to connect with us is through the Contact link on our website. Okay, it's right there, in Bold, and unlike other websites, we actually respond to our emails within 24 hours. That's a priority of ours, yeah

Scott Allen  35:06  
Well, Theo thank you so much. I really appreciate your time

Theo Dawson  35:09  
And thank you for asking! Be well.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai