7. DISC, Continuous Improvement, and Building Relationships that Work with Brett Cooper and Evans Kerrigan

Tara: Welcome to Mindful School Marketing, I’m Tara Claeys,

Aubrey: and I’m Aubrey Bursch. Today, we’re joined by Brett Cooper and Evans Kerrigan of Integris Performance Advisors. Brett and Evans help professionals build work relationships that really work. Over the last 20 years, they’ve influenced thousands of people in government, non-profit, and corporate America to work together in more productive, more effective, and more human ways. Both of our guests are widely recognized thought leaders and popular speakers on team dynamics, leadership, and operational excellence. Their keynotes always leave audiences inspired and ready to make a real impact. Welcome.

Evans: Thank you. We’re very glad to be here.

Tara: We’re so excited. You’re here. We’re really glad that you joined us and we can’t wait to get started hearing more about what you do. So tell us a little bit about yourselves and your background.

Brett: Yeah, this is going to be a lot of fun. We’re really excited to be here with you too, as well. So I’m Brett of the two, Evans is the, the other guy there on the screen. I’ll give everybody an introduction to who we are. So Evans and I have actually been working together for almost 20 years at this point, we started back with another organization when we were working on Lean Six Sigma process improvement, kind of consulting. So we were helping organizations with their process improvement efforts, balanced scorecard efforts and things like this. And we, we did really good projects with that and had a lot of fantastic outcomes with that. But one thing that we realized a number of years into doing that work is that something was missing. And that thing that was missing was a focus on teams, on leadership, on emotional intelligence. And so what we decided to do was back in 2011, we decided to start a new organization. That’s how we came up with Integris Performance Advisors. We started this new organization to help organizations that wanted to do all that continuous improvement kind of strategy work. But they wanted to do it in a way that allowed them to really make changes to the culture of the organization. So we essentially blended the ideas around Lean Six Sigma process improvement, continuous improvement with ideas around emotional intelligence, team dynamics, leadership effectiveness. That’s really how Integris was born. And now we’re going on 10 years with that organization and really excitingly, we just last year at the end of last year, one good thing that came out of the pandemic was we were able to release a book, a book that we wrote called Solving the People Problem, which kind of chronicles a lot of what Evans and I have learned together over these last two decades of doing the kind of work that I was explaining.

Aubrey: Well, first of all, congrats on your book. That sounds amazing. I can’t wait to dive into it. I’d love to hear more about emotional intelligence and continuous improvement. How do you define those terms and how do you see them applying to work relationships?

Evans: Sure. I’ll go ahead and get started, and then Brett, you can hop in with whatever you want to add in on this. I’ll start with the continuous improvement side, cause that’s kind of where we started as an organization as well and continuous improvements been around for a long time and under a lot of different names. When I got started a long time ago, it was actually total quality management was very popular in the United States. Since then it’s been Lean, it’s been Six Sigma, it’s Agile. But all of them really kind of boiled down to some very simple ideas, which is how can we better serve our customers? And in our case, in your case, this might be the parents of people who might send students our way and how can we get better outcomes while managing our research? So how can we become both more effective and more efficient? So we’ve been doing that work for quite a while and I got started in the TQM world back in the 1990s. I think it was the ’90s. I don’t think it goes back as far back as the ’80s., I think it was getting into the nineties. And and one of the things that we saw is we were working on business processes. One of those things that we talked about all the time, some continuous improvement is it’s not the people, it’s the process and you can have great people on your staff, but if your processes are bad, it really makes it difficult for them to perform at their best. So we worked on business processes. Brett said we had some really great things. We saved huge amounts of money. We got much better outcomes for organizations around projects we were doing, but we weren’t talking about a couple of processes that we found really effected everything in the organization. And those are the processes of how we led one another, how we communicated with one another and how we work as teams. And all of those processes really get tied together around the idea of improving our emotional intelligence and emotional intelligence is an idea that’s been around, you can go back into ancient writings, but really we talk about emotional intelligence, we’re really looking at those last 30 years and what it is, it’s how do we better interact with one another so that we can be successful? So it’s a really simple process to understand at that level. It’s not as easy to actually make the changes that we need to make. And that’s what we saw as really a gap for organizations we were working with. So we started kind of helping them to better build their self-awareness around who we are and how we’re interacting as well as their awareness of others in the organization. And it’s about both awareness, and then how do we apply that to get better at interacting with one another? And some of the stuff that’s important around emotional intelligence is a lot of studies have been done that have shown that it has twice the impact on a person’s career that their base intelligence or their IQ or their technical skills is actually going to have on what they’re able to accomplish. It’s how we work with one another that’s really that critical, we would say essential skill for moving forward.

Brett: Yeah. And if I can just add one thing that emotional intelligence is not, we are not saying that when you become a more emotionally intelligent, you’re becoming more emotional. This is not about, you know, touchy, feely, soft skills kind of thing. This is really, as Evans was just outlining it’s about, do you understand how you communicate? Do you understand how other people like to communicate and do you use that knowledge to really adapt, you know how you come across to the world? So anybody who thinks emotional intelligence, that’s touchy, feely stuff. Yeah. No, it’s not at all.

Tara: Yeah. Thanks for clarifying that. And what I really love about what you both have said, especially with Evans, just went over the idea of, of awareness. Which really is related to the topic of mindfulness, which is what we kind of talk about is approaching your daily responsibilities, mindfully whether you’re working in a school or anywhere else, or whether you’re home with your family. Mindfulness is something that we’re paying a lot of attention to, and it’s perhaps an overused term, but it’s really applicable here. And, and the idea of, of being mindful about your relationships with other people and how you work and how they work and how you can best work together. I know that you use something called the DiSC and we’ve talked about, Evans and I talked about that before we recorded and I’ve done the DiSC survey and I’d love to have you tell our audience a bit more about that, what it is and how it’s used.

Brett: Sure. I can give you a little background on, on DiSC. DiSC is a personality styles, communication styles, assessment. Now there are a ton of personality and style assessments out there and quite honestly, we think most of them are pretty powerful for different reasons. You know, people have probably heard about Meyers Briggs or NBTI, or maybe Enneagram. I know you guys have had another show about Enneagram, which is fantastic tool. The reason that we like DiSC for the work that we do is that DiSC is really focused on helping people understand how can I communicate more effectively? It’s a behavior based kind of an assessment, it’s observable behavior, and it’s something that teams can really easily use if you know your own DiSC style and, you know, the DiSC styles of other people on your team or, or other people that you’re interacting with in the workplace, you have a cheat sheet basically of what you can do to immediately start to be more effective when you communicate with other people. So question, what is DiSC? This is actually an acronym it’s D for dominance, I, for influence, S for steadiness and C for conscientiousness. These are the four main personality styles that exist in the general population. The theory. And the science around DiSC actually dates back to the 1920s. So we’re almost a hundred years in to the research on this. And over the course of that, a hundred years, the tools that use the model have evolved a great deal. So the DiSC assessment that we use now is the most advanced, scientifically advanced computer adaptive testing. It’s the most kind of robust approach to getting a disc assessment that we’ve ever had an opportunity to do. So what we’re able to do with DiSC is we look at how people essentially behave and come across to the world. So DiSC measures, two different spectrums. First it measures how fast paced or reserved, are you? And then it also looks the second spectrum, is it looks at how accepting or skeptical are you? So if you think about those two spectrums, anybody who’s listening can probably say, you know, all right, I am on the grand scheme of things, I think I’m probably either a little bit more fast-paced or maybe I’m a little more reserved. And they can probably just say, you know, I’m a little more accepting of new ideas when someone comes to me and says, hey, what do you think of this idea? I think that’s great. Let’s talk it through. That’s fantastic. Or do I say you better? Show me some more about that? You know, show me the money. I need some details about that, but those are the two spectrums that DiSC looks at, and by asking a series of questions, Where the disc assessment is essentially able to, kind of identify where you fall on that, this map and scopes out, are you more, mostly a D and I an S or a C type personality, and along with that comes all kinds of fantastic insights.

Aubrey: I am just intrigued by the DiSC. I’ve heard so much about it yet never really experienced it, and so hearing you talk about that was quite, quite interesting now, as you know, our podcast really talks about mindfulness. And I’m really curious, like how could a school use the DiSC and how does mindfulness apply to how the DiSC can help teams and administration, for example, hiring team dynamics, etc. like that?

Evans: Oh, it, it helps in a, in a multitude of ways. If we really think about it, We’re looking at DiSC and DiSCis a wonderful way to actually get a much deeper level of self-awareness about yourself, about what are the things that might stress you. One of the things that might make it easier for you to work, as well as the people around you. And in terms of mindfulness, what we’re really trying to say is how can I better interact with the world around me? And that starts with building that self-awareness. So DiSC provides a wonderful insight into self-awareness. The other thing that it actually does is it gives us a language to explore with others about our differences. One of the things that we say frequently in the book and frequently with our clients is a great deal of emotional intelligence is, how do I better honor the differences that we have? All too often in human communications we think about the way I communicate and the wrong way to communicate. And that’s just not real. We just all have different ways of communicating, in reality. The only way we really grow is by being able to hear the other perspective. So in terms of how teams and schools at any kind of a group actually work better, if we can start to better understand those styles, because there’s not any right and wrong style, all the styles are equally valuable and you are perfect wherever you are. But if we can’t honor the other styles, it’s going to cause difficulty, it’s going to cause friction, it’s going to make all of our interactions more difficult. So we got into it because when we were working with continuous improvement teams, we found those communication challenges getting in our way, but it works for any group. And I’m working right now with a team that’s actually kind of digging into this deeply because they’ve had problems for several years and the insights they’re getting, it’s almost become humorous. In some separate cases. People have really been at loggerheads for quite a while, have gotten into the DiSCtool and they’re kind of laughing about, oh, you don’t dislike me, you just have a different way of approaching this. Because we all start to put baggage into our conversations about if you’re acting that way, here’s what I think you must mean when frequently it’s just, we have a different way of approaching things. We have a different way of communicating. So taking off the guilt and weight about having to communicate it, lets us actually get to the issues we need to be able to discuss and to better honor one another, from whatever perspective we’re coming from. So, it’s really a game-changer and the teams we’ve been able to work with.

Brett: If I could piggy back on something that Evan just shared there, in the book solving the people problem, we actually share a lot of data around research and studies, some of the stuff that we’ve done, but a lot of things that other people have done on other organizations. And one of the studies that really jumps out to us is the fact that around the world over 50% and in the United States, 62% of employees blame the negative impact of conflict that they experienced in the workplace. They blame it on personality styles. They basically the differences of personalities and what we would argue is, it’s not the existence of different personalities. Last I checked, we all have a personality. So if that’s the source of a problem, we’re in trouble, but what really, the way we boil it down is the source of the problem is the fact that people don’t have a good understanding of the differences and they don’t honor those differences. So DiSC ,the connection to mindfulness is perfect because if you can understand your own kind of DiSC style and other people’s DiSC style, you gain the knowledge, the ability to be more mindful. And what we see in the organizations that embrace this kind of stuff, that conflict that they experienced based on personality differences, it goes way down because personality differences now become a source of value. It’s a source, it’s a source of diversity and diversity of thought and diversity of perspective. And if we’re going to be working together, either as business partners or, you know, a parent working with the school or administrators trying to figure things out. Getting different points of view and different perspectives, that’s going to help us come to an ultimately better outcome, whatever it is we’re trying to work on.

Tara: Yeah, I think I also wonder in terms of assigning or delegating responsibilities and tasks, whether knowing your own DiSC style helps you, or as Aubrey mentioned in hiring , when I used the DiSC, I was on a team and we knew what each other’s style was. And so when we were looking at who was going to do what, you know, that the person who is the S which is me, is somebody who kind of raises their hand and says, I’ll do it. I’ll do it, I’ll do it, and I knew that was my style. So I knew that I had to kind of keep that under restraint and the person who is the “i”, who’s the person who is the life of the party kind of person you know, that’s the person who planned the party. So it, does it also help you in that way to sort of, help you with your responsibilities or hiring?

Evans: A little bit, but I want to be really careful about this. While this helps us understand, kind of our comfort zone, if you will kind of what’s most natural to us, it is not a limitation. It does not say what I can or can’t do in any way, shape or form. And I’ll give you an example from one of our corporate clients, was working with an actuarial firm and the CEO asked kind of the same question. I’m going to hire actuaries. So I need to hire, in this case C’s are conscientious people really focused on accuracy, is kind of one of their big drivers. And I had to point out to them that actually several of their top actuaries were “i’s”. Style doesn’t control it. Style says here’s my comfort zone. Those actuaries who are eyes could be great actuaries. They may go about it differently. They may communicate about it a little bit differently, but style, isn’t a limitation. There’s things that are going to be easier for us and things that might take a little bit more energy. But if our interest is in those things that take more energy, that’s what really, makes me excited, I’m willing to put in that work and I can be very successful there. So I would never want this to be kind of putting somebody into a box. It’s hey, here are things we can do to communicate a little bit more, but I want to understand. What else there is, right. Personality isn’t everything. Right, there’s also what the skills I’ve learned, what my background and experience are, etc. So I just want to be a little bit careful about that.

Tara: Thank you for clarifying that, that makes a lot of sense, for sure.

Brett: I will say Tara, based on what you were talking about, you know, if you understand your own DiSC style, does that allow you to be more mindful and, and you know, potentially more effective? I would argue it absolutely does. I’ll take for me, so I happen to be, “i” type, I am a, so “i” is the influence type, people of my style tend to be pretty enthusiastic. We tend to be pretty action-oriented. We tend to come up with a lot of ideas and I fit that to the T. As Evans will tell you, I just keep going with the ideas, hey, here’s a great idea. Hey, here’s a great idea. And it was through my deepening understanding of DiSC and kind of connecting it with emotional intelligence that I realized along with some out some, some input from some others as we’re were doing this work that while my ideation is a very valuable thing for the role that I’m in, kind of thinking about the future and what’s the next round of products and services that we need to create. It can also be a detriment when I overuse it, because one of our team members at one point said, you know, one of the things you do slows down is, you know, you’re always ideating, we start working on a project probably on something that you thought of that you suggest that we do. And then we’ll, we’re working on the details trying to get it done, and here comes Brett thinking about, Hey, what about this? And she’s like, you can’t do that. You gotta let us focus. And I would argue that if, because I became more, self-conscious and more mindful around kind of my own style, my own communication practices that I really recognized, you know, there’s some times where things that might normally be a strength, if I overuse them or use them in the wrong situations, they can actually be a detriment. So, a similar thing there’s you can tell I’m kind of a little on that fast-paced little energetic side. You know, I work with a lot of people that are much more on the reserved side, and I’ve really recognized that, I have the ability to overpower those people and that’s never been my intention to do that, but I will tell you back in the early days at our undergrad, when I was doing a financial sales, as I was working with clients that when they started getting a little more reserved, the first thing that when I went into my emotionally unintelligent brain was, huh, I guess I’m not turning it on enough. Maybe if I just turn it on a little bit more, I can get them to engage. So it’s like exactly the wrong approach. Right? So, yeah, a long way to say Tara, that yeah, if we can get a better understanding of our own style, our own preferences, we gain all kinds of ability to interact with people in a more effective ways.

Tara: Yeah, for sure. We have a few questions that we ask all of our guests on the show, so what are the most important things that you do to grow professionally and personally you can each answer if you like, take turns.

Evans: For me, it’s it’s podcasts and books. I’m one of those who generally has five or six books in process at any one time. So, those are two of my big ones. And then for me, growing and developing is also making sure that actually take a little bit of time away, and take that time to refresh a little bit. For me, I have a granddaughter which great joy and, and and my two girls. So a little bit of time with family, a little bit of time to actually decompress so that when I’m focusing, I can actually focus.

Brett: And I would echo that, you know, finding new sources for new ideas, I’m more of an audio book guy. Evan’s likes to see it on the page. I like to hear it through the ears, but same general idea there. And especially today, I think podcasts have become such a fantastic tool for us. I’m so excited that you guys now have this podcast because you’re able to target an audience with relevant information to them. So as a podcast listener, I always go out and seek different kinds of podcasts that I can hear and gain new insights from different people. And it doesn’t have to be just the most well-known leader in the world that you’re getting information from. You can get all kinds of really great information from people that you would never hear of unless you tuned into a podcast or two.

Aubrey:What did we do before podcasts?

Brett: Right?

Aubrey: I don’t remember that world, but I love what you all said. And especially, also taking the time away to refresh your brain and to be mindful and spend time with those that you love. It’s really important. And it was great to hear you all say that. As we’re moving into our second question, what is one of the most important things that we can do to be more mindful? So our audience, what would your recommendations be?

Brett: I would say that everybody should take that time to self-reflect, going back to that story about about my own journey of kind of recognizing when my strength becomes a weakness, you know, if we all took a little bit of time to try to put ourselves in other people’s shoes and kind of reflect on how do other people interpret me? If you can have a little bit of mindfulness to be able to do that, that’s going to help you a great deal.

Evans: Okay. I’m going to hit a really similar point, but in a little bit different way I think. When we first wrote this book, we actually had a different subtitle to it, we ended up with Solving the People Problem, Essential Skills You Need to Lead and Succeed in Today’s World. Our original subtitle for solving the people problem was, and You’re the Problem. Our editor told us that may sound nice and it may be correct, but you’re not going to sell any books. So we chose to change the subtitle, but there’s truth to that statement. So I would say one of the things that I was looking at is, especially when something doesn’t go quite right, I always start with, how could I have contributed to that? Because that’s where the learning can happen, and it’s also the only thing I can actually change is how I interact in a situation. So what I found is when I start from there, rather than start by pointing a finger in any other direction, there’s always new learning that happens there, and I learned a little bit about myself and a little bit about how I’m interacting with others. So kind of very similar to Brett’s point, but I kind of take it from that perspective of, I’m the only tool I have to improve outcomes. So that’s where I need to start my query.

Tara: Yeah. I think that’s really important. As someone who’s hard on herself, I will say it’s also, there’s also a balance there too, because when you put it all on yourself, I think you can also sometimes be too hard on yourself and take too much, so I don’t know how that balance fits in, but I think a lot of it has to do with being mindful enough to understand yourself and, and what the limiting talk that you give yourself sometimes. So, so those are great, great tips. Thank you for sharing them. Perfect. I’m going to do some rapid-fire questions now. So we’re going to kind of go through these quickly. If you could put one book as mandatory reading in the school curriculum, what would it be? High school curriculum. High school.

Brett: Yeah. I got this one. Okay. Solving the People Problem. Essential Skills You Need to Lead and Succeed in Today’s World, it’s a fantastic read. I will actually say, of course, I’m going to say that, but I will say it has been an Amazon bestseller and here’s some social proof entrepreneur magazine named it, the number one must-read book for 2021. So don’t trust me. But trust entrepreneur magazine, their Amazon reviews are pretty amazing. Yeah, we actually we’ve we’ve been fortunate to have some people getting on there and sharing a little bit about what they’ve learned. So, yeah, we’re pretty excited about that.

Tara: That’s great.

Evans: So if I get add a title, how could I follow that one up?

Tara: I know that was a plan. That was not a plant. We do ask that of everyone.

Evans: It’s great question, but I’ll take a, I’ll take one we didn’t write, because I think it’s one that’s really important for a high school audience to think about, and that would be Mindset by Carol Dweck. I think that’s a really impactful book for people to understand that you do have the power, if you are never stuck with who you are and your outlook, your mindset, and how you look at that is going to go a great deal of the way toward what you can do in your life. So I think it’s a very empowering read and a lot of her research is around children and that impact. So I think for a high school level person, I think that’s a really empowering book. Excellent.

Aubrey: Yeah. Evans. I would have to agree with you. I love that book and I love what you said about mindset and about how we can approach each situation with that, I mean, it all comes down to what’s going on inside our head and the mindset we choose. Right. So thank you for sharing that book. And I’m going to ask you another question. So what is one app you couldn’t live without?

Evans: Zoom for the last year. We actually, we talked about this. I don’t know how I could have done anything in the last year without zoom. I mean, I’ve, I’ve had weird zoom calls. I mean, I’ll be perfectly honest. I led call a 48 people on Zoom, I was doing some training and I lost power five minutes before it started. But in it with the modern miracle of technology, I mean, I hot spotted had enough battery in the computer, luckily and everything was hooked up through the computer, there’s no lights and they, everything got dark because it was a very overcast day. So my wife is running around the house grabbing candles and we lit candles all around tables. So I did a I did a Blair witch project Zoom call with 48 people. Zoom has enabled us to do things that I, I don’t know how I could have handled it in any other way or how many of us could have handled a lot of what’s happened over the last year.

Aubrey: Yeah, thank goodness for zoom. And that’s amazing. I could just picture it. I was visualizing like all the candles around and like it was dimly lit, but probably the ambience was quite nice, a little flickering light.

Evans: I did hold a candle.up below my chin for a minute just to get that really spooky flavor. Yeah. It’s an interesting meeting.

Brett: And another app that I think is very helpful. It goes back to something we were talking about a little earlier, Aubrey, you made the comment, what do we do before podcasts? I like to use a app called Downcast for my podcasts is a great tool to organize, and one of the things probably in line with my I DiSC style, when I listen to a podcast, I never listen to it on regular speed. I always click it up, click it up, click it up until I can just make it out and I go pull it back. One notch, one notch. That’s where I listened to things. Anyway, Downcast allows me to organize the podcasts and adjust the playback speeds, which were pretty important for me.

Tara: Wow. Awesome. Yeah, I’ve tried that. There are some, there are some podcasts where the guests speak slowly enough that I can speed them up. But it’s I guess it stresses me out to try to speed them up. It makes me feel hurried.

Aubrey: Meanwhile, I’m thinking it I might be an “i”, I’ve got to totally take the test.

Tara: Oh, you’re definitely an “i”. No question about it. I’m like,

Aubrey: I speed up the podcast too, and I need to do, I need to look into this app.

Tara: You are definitely an “i”.

Aubrey: I love it. Okay.

Evans: We’ll talk after this, Aubrey, we’ll take care of you.

Tara: Next rapid-fire question. What are you reading right now?

Brett: So I’m reading a book called Everyday People, Extraordinary Leadership. This is by a couple of guys, Jim Kouzes and Barry Posner, who happened to be a couple of mentors of ours. These two have been a fixture in the leadership development space for over 30 years, they wrote a book called the leadership challenge. Which is one of the seminal books on leadership. It really outlines a 30 plus year study on leadership that they’ve been doing. And Everyday People, Extraordinary leadership is the latest book that they’ve put out, just came out in the last handful of months. So I’m just starting to dig into that and really enjoying it. There’s a lot of really good stories and a lot of good insights about how to become the best leader you can be.

Evans: Super, I’ll keep my list short. I am reading that book as well, and it does a beautiful job of bringing out the fact that leadership is not a position. It’s a way in which we interact with other people to get great things done. I’m also reading a book called First Principles by Thomas Ricks. That’s about how the Greek and Roman philosophies were used by the founding fathers here in the country. And one other would be Cal Newport’s A World Without Email.

Aubrey: Oh, my gosh, I’m putting these all on my list. I love all these topics like the leadership, all of them. And I have not read Cal Newport. Is that the new, a new book?

Evans: That’s Cal Newport’s new book. I’m reading that in the book club, actually with a bunch of people overseas.

Tara: So that’s a fiction book, right world without email? That’s a novel?

Evans: That is not a novel, his last book I really loved, which was Oh, shoot. I’m drawing a blank on the name now. It was really about getting, stepping away from technology. Cal Newport does a lot of work about being able to be creative and being able to have the time to do deep thought.

Tara: Did he write Deep Work? Was that his?

Evans: Deep Work was his as well. He’s one of my favorites.

Aubrey: We always joke that my bookshelf keeps growing and it takes over rooms. And so now it will be extended because I will be looking at these titles.

Evans: I started doing all of these from this room because there just aren’t as many books, the other room look really crowded.

Aubrey: So you’ve selected the few you will display. Well, that’s great. Well, I have our last question. What is one great piece of advice you’d like to leave us with?

Brett: I actually have something that I think could be very helpful for people listening and that it’s connected to the solving the people problem journey that we’ve been on. As part of writing the book, Evans and I did some research and created an emotional intelligence survey that is now available on solvingthepeopleproblem.com. And we’d be glad to give it to your listeners absolutely free. If they want to go to solvingthepeopleproblem.com and click on the What’s My DiSC EQ? link in the menu items, they can go there, they enter the access code of MINDFUL, and they’ll be able to take this emotional intelligence survey that is not just going to give them a score on how, how do they compare to everybody else related to their self-awareness and awareness of others styles. But even more importantly, it’s going to give them a bunch of tips and tailored advice around what they can do to make themselves just a little bit more effective as they communicate with other people. So I’d say take the emotional intelligence survey and use it as a mirror and see what you can learn from it.

Aubrey: Absolutely. I’m so excited that you all are offering that. Thank you so much. I think our listeners will really enjoy it and get a lot of it.

Evans: Sure. So I’ll, I’ll keep mine short, but I’m going to use, I’m going to have actually two pieces to this. The first is that you need to be able to honor the differences. So, so my advice is, look for those differences. Cause that is where we learn. That is where we grow. It’s,when I hear a different perspective, my first thought should be, that’s wonderful. You have a different way of looking at this. What could I learn? What might I be missing? And at the same time, we also need to be able to give other people as well as ourselves. some grace, it’s really easy to think we have to do this perfectly. We’re all on a journey. It’s part of becoming more emotionally Intelligent. It’s giving us the permission to learn along the way. It’s not about the destination. It’s also about our journey and the beauty is that we can all become more emotionally intelligent work better with more and more people in our lives, and frequently what we find is that those sparks that grow that are not as comfortable at the time. So, so learn to kind of look for those differences, and when you find yourself becoming defensive, kind of ask a question, see if there’s something you can learn along the way.

Tara: That’s great. Thank you. Yeah. Defensive is, could go off on that for a really long time too. Have you thought about that a lot over the past year, but such great advice and thank you so much for offering our guests, your survey. We will be putting that in the show notes for sure. Where can people find you online?

Brett: So the easiest place is going to be go to solvingthepeopleproblem.com. You can reach out to me there, Evans there. We also have other content. If you like the things that we’ve been talking about, there’s a bunch of other information there. You can also find both of us on LinkedIn. So I’m Brett M Cooper and Evans is just Evans Kerrigan on LinkedIn.

Evans: With a first name like Evans I didn’t need a middle initial to separate.

Aubrey: It has been so much fun chatting with you all, and I’ve learned so much. So thank you so much for being on our show. We very much enjoyed learning from you.