SHOW NOTES:

SUMMARY: In this episode, Stephanie Crowe and Matt Zaun talk about growing your leadership skills.

STEPHANIE CROWE BIO: Stephanie is the CEO of Learn.net. She is also a Best-Selling Author and Speaker.

For more info on Stephanie:
LinkedIn
Website

MATT ZAUN BIO: Matt is an award-winning speaker and storyteller who empowers organizations to attract more clients through the art of strategic storytelling. Matt’s past engagements have catalyzed radical sales increases for over 300 organizations that range from financial institutions to the health and wellness industry.

Matt shares his expertise in persuasion with executives, sales professionals, and entrepreneurs, who he coaches on the art of influence and how to leverage this for profits and impact.

For more info, check out Matt Zaun HERE. 

 

*Below is an AI-generated transcript, which may contain errors

 

 

Matt Zaun

September of last year, I was speaking in Georgia, and there was an individual in my session that shared some stories that blew me away.

I had to have her on so these stories could be shared with you as well. Today I'm joined by Stephanie Crow, who's the CEO of Learn.net.

In addition, she's a best-selling author and speaker.

 

Stephanie Crowe (Learn.net)

Welcome to the show, Stephanie. Thanks for having me, Matt.

 

Matt Zaun 

I appreciate your time. I know you're extremely busy, so I really appreciate you spending some time with us today.

I wanted to have right in the story. One of the stories that you shared with me back in September, I can't believe it's been half a year now, but I remember elements of this story.

It was such an great cage. story. So can you just give and through the story, you will, but give people a little bit about your background and just dive right into the story regarding your father.

 

Stephanie Crowe (Learn.net)

Sure, absolutely. You know, up, we definitely had what we needed, but we didn't always have what we wanted. I'm sure there's a lot of folks in the audience who've had this experience.

And I didn't really realize what it took for us to really achieve what we achieved as a family. But looking back, I heard a lot of our stories from growing up.

So turns out, on his way back from East Asia, serving in East Asia, my father came back to have a family, two young girls, and so quite frankly they're having trouble making ends meet.

So he ended up having three jobs. each month, what I heard later, one of the stories my mom and dad would get together and pull up the big popcorn bowl, throw all the bills into that bowl.

And you know, So close their eyes and pick out which one actually could get paid off that month, right?

So that's how close things were while we were growing up. That third job was probably the worst one, I'm sure.

Dad would go into one of the local office complexes and he was working as a janitor in this office complex and that would be third shift, right?

Overnight, clean up the office and one day when he was putting away the mops and the materials and such he saw a job posting and it said if you can type 35 words a minute we'll hire you and this company was not just any company it was IBM this was a great opportunity he could get hired into the data center and this was the early 70s I mean it was tough to find tech talent, talent at all in the 70s and quite frankly this is Vermont Burlington Vermont so not a hotbed.

of tech talent there either. So here he's thinking, all I gotta do is figure out how to type 35 words a minute.

And he was in, he was dedicated, and he was ready to teach himself this skill. But what you don't know about my dad is that he grew up in the backwoods of Maine.

And we're talking single room shack, five person family, like a single light bulb hanging from the center of the ceiling kind of thing.

They had to pump their own water. They chopped their own wood for heat. And one day when they were younger, you know, my dad's brother and he were chopping wood and his brother missed.

And I tell you, since that day, my dad's only had nine fingers. He's missing his index finger on his left hand.

So fast forward to the point where he's going to figure out how to type 35 words a minute. And he

That's with his two middle fingers, right? I mean, hunting pack, hunting pack, hunting packs. So he, but I gotta tell you Matt, he did it.

He figured it out. He learned that skill. He taught himself how to type 35 words a minute and he got that job.

Fast forward from there and he ended up learning network telecommunication skills. He became a network telecommunication analyst and then a project manager and eventually sales engineer and a program manager and had a very long successful career with IBM.

And that really changed the trajectory of our family's functions also from that point forward. I'm the first person in my family to get my college degree.

My sister and I both have degrees. have a graduate degree and this really taught me about learning forward and how people in their careers need the opportunity to learn into new skills.

to grow the careers but that's also why I went into the learning industry I believe when I look back and say I believe so much that learning makes the difference from people.

 

Matt Zaun 

Sure wow thank you for sharing that that is unbelievable. I love that you mentioned the the fishbowl of popcorn bowl with the different bills I mean I'm sure that was not a fun game for your parents.

 

Stephanie Crowe (Learn.net)

Hey you know what make it fun.

 

Matt Zaun 

We got a game of diet right but it also speaks to the grit that you had in your family right.

This thing that displayed for you probably led you in a direction to absorb more in your life to be more resilient to have that grit.

So as you kind of look back on that experience I guess your early childhood experience what can you say now being an adult when it comes to grit because clearly you didn't have everything under the sun when you were growing up there was there is it a lot of advice.

diversity based on the experience you shared. So how do you think that that mold that you from a grip perspective into the leadership position you have today?

 

Stephanie Crowe (Learn.net)

It surprises me when I hear from other people that they did not have the same experience I had, which is no one ever told me I couldn't do something.

They never said, oh, you can't be because of, because you're female or because you're from somewhere or because of your experience or because of, you know, your lack of experience.

It was always if you want something, go learn it. And so in my mind, the sky was the limit.

Anything I wanted, I just had to set my mind to and be willing to do the work. So as you think there's grit, I think there's also a belief system that says, you know, don't let it stop you, right?

Figure it out. Go find me. what you need, get what you need to get, whether it's learning, education, that sort of thing to get where you're going.

I think that's been a really big part of that grit of achievement, I experienced it all through growing up, which was I got validation for my teachers when I worked hard, and then I almost became addicted to that validation, to keep trying that and to keep doing well, and whatever you set your mind to be the best at it.

 

Matt Zaun 

So it really speaks to an element of focus, right, so clearly you were focused. You weren't saying, hey, I can't do this because of X, Y, and Z, but there are a lot of people listening to this that may be experiencing that.

They may have these seeds of doubt. They may be thinking about past experiences and having anxiety for the future based on certain things.

So what would you say to someone from a focus perspective, like what advice would you give them to be able to focus more?

or kind of to block out some of that noise.

 

Stephanie Crowe (Learn.net)

So focus is such an interesting word because you can focus on negative things and you can focus on the wrong things, right?

if you focus on your failures, then that's all you're going to see. And if you focus on where you've succeeded and where you've shown that you can learn something or do something, then that's what you'll experience.

I also left a little bit from myself when you said focus. sound so focused. I actually really have always loved keeping my options open, just my personality type.

I always want to be able to bob and weave and say, I can't do this and I'll do this and if I can't do this, then I'll do this.

So to me, knowing that failure is information, that a mistake or an error is information of, oh, it didn't work that way.

So I'll try another way. So to me, the focus is not on the immediate. It's on the goal and the result that you're going for and allowing a lot of flexibility in how you're achieving.

If that makes sense of the difference between focusing on the result versus focusing on the obstacle that you're staring down.

 

Matt Zaun 

So the failure is information, is that to build up better processes based on that failure?

 

Stephanie Crowe (Learn.net)

Yeah, I mean, processes and or flexibility. So I'm a big believer in agile and whether you're applying agile to software development since I'm currently running a software company.

But also in terms of learning development and business, being able to say just one, there's not only one way to achieve something, and my dad could tell you that.

You can type 35 words a minute whether you've got 10 fingers or not. So when you think about a challenge, I can't even say it as an obstacle or an error.

I like it's a challenge. It's great. Bring it on. want to get over around this obstacle. And by the way, that also differentiates you from your competition, because if they're staring at the obstacle, they're not looking at the way around it.

 

Matt Zaun (mattzaun.com)

What if the failure has some pretty intense consequences?

 

Stephanie Crowe (Learn.net)

Can you give me an example?

 

Matt Zaun 

Yeah, so someone is thinking about investing in a certain project and their company, and they could go forward with the project.

And it's like a toss up. Like, if it works out, it's going to be amazing. It's going to bring in tons of revenue for the company.

But if it doesn't work out, they're on the hook for a ton of just investments, they shouldn't have been doing.

So now it's going to potentially blow up on their face, it's going to cause all kinds of man, they might have to lay people off based on them putting this project forth.

 

Stephanie Crowe (Learn.net)

So what if the failure has a ton of potential negative consequences?

 

Matt Zaun 

How do you how do you how do you view that as information? I mean, I guess we still would, but it'll be

on a higher level, right?

 

Stephanie Crowe (Learn.net)

Absolutely. consequences are real and I actually love the fact that the world has real life consequences. And understanding what those are and using the information about real world consequences gives us advice and guidance on contingency planning and what are the best options to do with our investments, with our time, with our money, our resources.

So when I liken it back to, again, my upbringing, I also raised my kids this way, pain is information, right?

So when you start to experience pain, you might decide to work through it or you might decide, hey, I need to back off a little bit and find out where this is coming from.

It's not, you know, always O.E. God's call, you know, the emergency room. Sometimes it is and sometimes it isn't, but we're not going to make good decisions if we are either blindly thinking, everything is fine.

I'm going to ignore pain. all information that's to the negative. But I also am not going to succeed if I think every little bump and bruise is something that tells me I should stop because then I'm always in that practice of stopping.

So to me if you're in a neutral situation where the benefits and the consequences are neutral that's a no.

Because to me I work with and you mentioned the book, the book 10x Leader is all about 10x interventions where you have an intervention that allows you 10x results.

The margin of error can be pretty wide when you're getting 10x results. If you're only doing break even there's something wrong with your strategy.

That when we're doing business, when we're making changes in the world, all the effort that we put into it, there's a certain amount that we're not calculating into that ROI calculation.

So you want to go over the estimate. I mean, imagine the popcorn bowl full of bills. You don't want to say, hey, I'm going to make just enough money to pay off those bills.

Same in business. I'm not going to make just enough money to cover my costs, but first not, there's going to be unexpected costs, unexpected interferences.

And so you need to really go above a certain bar. And I'm talking more than IRR, right? I'm talking more than the internal rate of of a given project.

You want to exceed that. And that's how you really get extraordinary results is by going further past the bar.

So if you've got a neutral position or neutral situation, then you need to trade up.

 

Matt Zaun 

Sure, sure. All right. So let's dive into the 10x leader piece, because I'm showing as people listening and thinking of themselves, like they can't even fathom 10x their leadership abilities.

 

Stephanie Crowe (Learn.net)

So let's just start with doubling.

 

Matt Zaun 

If someone wanted to, if someone wanted to double or triple or quadruple, or whatever the case may be, if they wanted to radically expand their ability to be a leader, what would be a couple of things that you would say, you need to set the groundwork here.

This needs to be the solid foundation before it could be built.

 

Stephanie Crowe (Learn.net)

What would some of those things be? Yeah, I would say that the main issue is the diagnosis of the situation you're in.

So the 10x leader method talks about diagnosis, linking your interventions to your business results, and then multiplying impact through leverage.

So it's diagnosis, linking, and leverage. And it's based off of these three errors that people make because they miss this.

When people misdiagnose, they go, you know what we really need? And they think that what they need is something that is exciting or new or interesting, but they actually don't diagnose the business problems, either in their market, in how they're operating, in their teams.

And because they fail to pause and diagnose, they're not to getting impact from their leadership, they're just stepping in and saying here's what we really ought to want to have, you know, or here's what we should do.

And that may be based on past experience, it may be based on looking what somebody else did and saying oh we should mimic that without recognizing the real situational factors and data associated with your real business, your real market, your real customers, your real products.

So, diagnosis I think is really the first step in saying what is the biggest impact we could make, what's the biggest either problem we could resolve or opportunity we could take advantage of and that's a basic SWOT analysis, right, weaknesses, opportunities and threats.

And then determining an intervention that's going to fix that one thing. And that one thing usually has a people component to it, which I'm a huge advocate of as a learning professional, which is to say that who needs to learn.

what to fix that problem or to take advantage of that opportunity. And that can give people extraordinary results.

 

Matt Zaun 

So the first was like, you know, a situation in Iran, the second you say was determine the intervention, linkages, the links between the links and the business results you're going to get out of it, you need to link it to your KPIs and your measures for actual results.

Okay, so to turn the links and then you mentioned a third one about leverage, leverage, leverage, okay. What does leverage mean to you?

I think sometimes there's different pictures that pop up in people's mind when they when they when they think of that word leverage.

 

Stephanie Crowe (Learn.net)

So what's the picture that comes to your mind? So I like to think of all the things you did as a toddler when you weren't very strong and you had to move things, you had to figure out leverage, whether it was the seesaw on the playground or whether it was I need to push this box because it's in my way.

If you're small, you need to figure out how to move it. You might use a different angle. You might use tools like wheels.

You might be able to get some assistance, right? So any kind of leverage, I like to look at the people leverage.

So when you have customers, you can engage customers to leverage your launches or your products or your insights on how you're adding value.

You could leverage your partners across reseller agreements or value added resellers. You could leverage your vendors. Maybe your vendors could be providing more for you in ways that you weren't taking advantage of.

You can leverage the structure of your organization. So if you have departments or teams that are not integrated and they're in silos, you have the opportunity to leverage one intervention, let's say you were fixing, I don't know, accounts receivable.

And that's the responsibility of the finance team, particularly the AR team. If you leave it there, you don't get any leverage.

On the other hand, if you say for the next 30 days, AR is everybody's problem. You teach everyone about the leverage with accounts receivable.

And then you discover that the number one reason why people are not paying their bill is because they have a customer service issue.

Now AR becomes customer service and project management's issue, right? We know this is X, but it's leverage if we say everybody's job is fixing the cash flow, getting some AR in.

The project managers or the customer service people resolve those issues that are preventing accounts receivable from happening. We teach them the skill of asking for the payment.

Are you happy with our service? Yes, I am. How can we expedite your payment? And then hand it over to accounts receivable.

We've created a team opportunity, but we've also created a leverage across multiple.

 

Matt Zaun 

departments or our organization. I love that. I love that. All right. So I have to I have to give you a picture because as you're speaking, this picture has come to my mind and I think that there's definitely correlation when it comes to business.

So I wrestled for 10 years. I was a big part of my life. A lot of matches. And there was a kid on my high school wrestling team that was ranked second in the country.

Okay. So second in the country is one of the best wrestlers in the United States of America. He barely had any muscle on him.

Okay. So if if I, if you and you can have what's that and you're thinking, how exactly? if you see an image of this guy, you would think how on earth is, is this person a wrestler?

Let alone one of the best in the country. He was dominant. I mean, half the matches would forfeit on him because they realized they were going to be put through tremendous pain.

If they had to wrestle him, what he would do is he would use other people's leverage against them. So if you were extremely strong,

He would use your strength against you and it really spoke to his element of creativity on how he was able to use his body to pin as many people as he did.

Now why I say that is because as you're speaking to me it almost paints this like David and Goliath type story where if someone is running a department and maybe they have a lack of resources or maybe their team is way smaller than their competitors or whatever the case may be they need to use leverage to be creative to not only think outside the box but do outside the box right doing is the action to really lead them to those results.

 

Stephanie Crowe (Learn.net)

So how do you think a creativity really ties together with that leverage piece? I think one of the things that came to mind for me was business acumen as well which may be a bit of an overused phrase but I do think that people need to understand exactly how value gets out of time.

customers, how processes get enacted. You mentioned process earlier when we were speaking. And the higher up one goes in an organization, by the way, the less you understand how things actually get done in your organization.

So it's important to recognize this as executive and leaders that we probably have a very shallow view of what it really takes to get things done in the organization.

And so some patients and also humility and listening is important when we figure out, okay, why is this happening and how could something be fixed is really digging into how that value is getting added, how those processors are being deployed so that we can improve or release them.

So I imagine that this wrestler knew a lot about his own body, right, and how much he could pull on one thing

versus another and how it was all connected, so very self-aware and where he could put himself in terms of leverage according to the other individual in the ring.

So when we consider putting in some leverage, we have to understand all the angles, how much strength we have, and how much strength we don't have in each of these areas.

So I do think it takes creativity, but it takes creativity of looking at all those options, doing all that contingency or scenario planning for all of the options, picking up not necessarily the best, but maybe a good route to try in an agile way to say, this work?

If we change this, will this work? And I do believe in empowering the people in the organization to come up with some of those ideas because they know more about how the work gets done than most of us in leadership positions do.

 

Matt Zaun 

So you mentioned a really important piece that I don't want people to mess, and it's It's as you continue to build out your leadership, you're going to be in different situations, different positions, and now a lot of what you might have worked on the past, you're not working on anymore, and some people may think to themselves, oh, you're great at delegating, not just you, but anyone you're great at delegating, and that's awesome, right?

That's a very desirable skill to be able to put the right people in the right seats, but then they could potentially lose sight of what's happening, like how things are actually made, how processes are actually carried out.

So what would it a strategy that you would recommend people could do to not lose sight of some of the things that they should be at least aware of?

Yes, they're still delegating, but they still need to be aware of something.

 

Stephanie Crowe (Learn.net)

Can you think of a strategy or maybe setting up learning tours, or what would that look like to you in an organization?

Oh, I'm so in a patent learning tour now, Matt. Thank you. I do believe in that. I also think that leaders need to stay close to the customer, right?

have opportunities to do skip levels where they chat and have round tables or conversations with individuals at multiple levels in the organization, just ask how are things going, give people a voice.

It's a distinct human need to be able to be heard and seen, and that creates a great deal of engagement.

I also think that recognizing that empowering people takes some trust. So yes, I do think you should ask lot of questions in a gentle way, not in a check up kind of way, but in a check in kind of way.

I'm not checking up on you, just checking in, how are things going, what could be better, you know, anything I can help with.

That's the support portion of delegation. If somebody says they're a good delegator and they believe in seagull management, which is, you know, flying over, dumping on somebody and flying off again.

and that's not delegation. Delegation also requires the equivalent amount of support, which is how can I get you what you need in order to accomplish these goals?

 

Matt Zaun 

Because we're team together and I can get you the resources to help make that happen. Sure.

 

Stephanie Crowe (Learn.net)

So that to me, I think, is part of the whole picture. I do love having the opportunity to talk to customers to be on the ground, observe in whichever way you can.

It doesn't happen very often, maybe only on the show under cover boss, but I do think every once in a while CEOs, presidents, vice presidents should sit in on some support calls, you know, just listen in, get to hear what it's like.

One of my favorite habits that I heard a CEO have was that he read every single exit interview. It was his commitment.

Every time somebody exited the company, they would do their exit interview with HR. It would get recorded according first we didn't know who it was, but he would read every single one so that he understood and kept pace and kept a finger on the pulse of how the employees were feeling in the organization for real because people say the truth when they're on their way out.

 

Matt Zaun 

Well, for people to say they have a vibrant company culture, a better way to understand how vibrant that culture is by saying why people would want to leave that?

 

Stephanie Crowe (Learn.net)

Why did they leave? And there are good reasons, right? But there also there's some honesty that you know and insights that you can get certainly.

Hopefully before then, that's a trailing indicator of course. Sure.

 

Matt Zaun 

So you mentioned a keyword habit, so let's dive into that. So obviously you're you are very interested in habits building out the right habits.

What are your thoughts on habits and how leaders should evaluate, right? So going back to diagnosing a situation, could it be that we're in situations that are very challenging based on our habits?

You . . Stephanie can you hear me if Rose up there. There go. Can you hear me okay?

 

Stephanie Crowe (Learn.net)

Yes.

 

Matt Zaun 

Okay. You froze a little bit.

 

Stephanie Crowe (Learn.net)

it appears okay right now.

 

Matt Zaun 

Okay, yeah, it's perfect now.

 

Stephanie Crowe (Learn.net)

Okay.

 

Matt Zaun 

All right, I'm going to dive into the habits piece and we'll kind of, I'll just, we'll edit out that piece, obviously.

 

Stephanie Crowe (Learn.net)

Sure.

 

Matt Zaun 

All right, so let's, let's dive into habits, because you mentioned habits, right, having a habit of reading those exit interviews, right?

So obviously that's a habit that's going to yield some pretty positive results based on feedback on how they could tweak different things.

So clearly, solid habits goes into being a better leader. So how would you have someone evaluate habits or think about habits differently?

would be like an action plan that someone could take to make sure that they're doing the right habits and also the blind spots?

Maybe there's habits that they don't even know that they need. How would someone go about finding out the habits they need to instill in their company?

Thank you. You I'm going to kill a few apps here.

 

Stephanie Crowe (Learn.net)

Yeah, no worries. I had meant to do that before. Either that or it's just Comcast. All right, let's give that another shot.

 

Matt Zaun 

All right. I'm going to re-ask the a different way and we'll dive in. Yeah. Yeah. Let's see, bros again there.

 

Stephanie Crowe (Learn.net)

I've never had this.

 

Matt Zaun 

No worries. don't know. You want to give another shot? Yeah. Might as well. All right. So failure is information, right?

So you mentioned habits, right? The importance of habits. clearly, the CEO that you mentioned, you know, reading different exit interview pieces, under, like, that's a, that's a good.

good habit that's going to yield hopefully positive results of different things are changed based on the information that individuals getting.

 

Stephanie Crowe (Learn.net)

So how would you how would you inspire leaders to think about habits and how do you how do you coach someone when it comes to blind spots right and here's what I mean by this we all know we need good habits right like if we want good things to happen we need good habits but what about the blind spots on habits we don't even know we need how does someone go about finding those out sure there's so much there Matt I believe the number one attribute or skill that a leader can have is self-awareness and continuously developing that 360 view of how their leadership is being experienced and that is all about blind spots now we've been doing a lot of work at Learn.net around habits and it's been very interesting to discuss

cover, that the modern leader is so unbelievably distracted that it has changed the way we learn. We can't even focus for long periods of time anymore.

So the ability to sit down in some multi-day leadership course and all of a sudden change our leadership style is actually waning.

Our ability to do that and it's partly our brain makeup, it's partly the number of distractions and it's partly how busy we all are.

So focus is in short supply and when we think about what habits a leader needs, the first one I would recommend, which I always have done, it has to do with that comment about leaders going up into the organization and knowing less about how work gets done.

There's another thing that happens as you move up in an organization. It's that you are less likely to receive training.

All of a sudden we think we know what we need to know, I'm good. I've gotten to the point where I wanted to get to so we really give up on continuous learning and that I believe is an error.

The way to overcome that is two pieces. The first is the 360 view and asking people how they're experiencing your leadership but the other is having a learning plan.

We expect every person in our organization that learned.net and we recommend other people do and as I was a chief learning officer for several different organizations we wanted everyone to have a learning plan.

We would give them structures and recommendations based on their career but every individual is different and so based on what they want but also what the business needs we would make recommendations and it was up to them to drive their learning.

So I believe that each leader should have their own learning plan. When I became CEO of learn.net I sat down and said what do I need to build?

What do I need to know? should I develop and created a plan for myself? because there wasn't anyone around to do that for me.

So, to me, that's the number one habit. And then from there, recognize that learning is not watching something or reading something.

That's consuming. So, we now have these bad habits of watching a video and saying, I know how to do this, or reading a book and saying, I've learned something new.

Well, you've become aware of something new, but until you actually apply it, psychologists would say you haven't learned it because the psychological definition of learning is habituation.

If you've moved it from the front of your brain, which is the prefrontal cortex where you have to think about it to the back of your brain, where you don't have to think about it anymore to become part of you, then you've really learned it.

So, that to me is, what do I need to habituate so I can move it to the back of my brain and focus on new skills and that habituation of checking in with your people, getting through

60 feedback, finding out what's going on with the customers, watching the P&L, watching the revenue, or the margins, or what are the things that you are watching on a regular basis and making sure that those habits are the right ones for you, and then adding or subtracting from that as appropriate.

 

Matt Zaun 

Wow. I really like what you said that watching or reading something is consuming, it's not actually learning because there's a lot of people out there that may be thinking that.

And that could be spelling horror for them because they don't actually know how to do it, right? And it could be very dangerous because there's so much information out there.

We know a lot about a lot of different things, but we might not know how to apply it.

 

Stephanie Crowe (Learn.net)

So I really appreciate you saying that. think there's a ton of things you've learned, Matt. always tell you one more story.

I used to love to play piano when I was a kid, not because I liked the theory. I hated it.

I hated going through the regular scales. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, I'm 10, A, B, C, D, E, all that sort of thing, but I loved playing the theme to mash or getting to play Hill Street Blues.

And it was my favorite thing, whenever I would walk by a piano, I'd sit down and play Hill Street Blues on a piano.

was like, that sounds great. Well, I had a big birthday recently, by a piano, I sat down and I couldn't do it.

I had forgotten how to do not just the left hand, which a lot of pianists will remember the melody, but not the harmony.

I couldn't remember the harmony. And then I sat and I had to pick out the melody and I had to really reacquaint myself with that sheet of music.

So even if you learned it a long time ago, those skills that you learned in school or grad school or that great training course.

If you haven't reinforced it, then you've probably forgotten. And this is what we do at Learn.net, is we help people habituate the most important top of mind skills because we do, we forget.

We don't even remember what we've forgotten. You've watched that video, you've read that book, and you're not really using that skill anymore.

 

Matt Zaun 

Sure. There are a lot of perishable skills in our life, right?

 

Stephanie Crowe (Learn.net)

of them like that.

 

Matt Zaun 

Not like rotting a bike, right? A lot of skills are perishable, so we need to understand which ones are, for sure.

Public speaking is a perishable skill, so, you know, there's a lot of people that, it's amazing. They stop speaking for a few years and then they get back up on stage and they're like, how do I do this again?

I'm to make a lot of people got out of the habit, Matt. For sure. For sure. Well, thank you for your time.

I really appreciate it. mean, this interview was steeped in tons of wisdom and there's a lot of takeaways, but there's a few that I'm going to focus in on based on

what you'd mentioned Stephanie. So the first one was pain and or failures information. think that is an incredible rule of thumb.

I think that's a huge perspective shift, right? Because we all go through failure. How could we use it as information for fuel for success?

I think that was a huge takeaway. The second was I really appreciate you mentioning and kind of breaking it down for us.

Diagnosis situation you're in, determine the lengths and then focus on that leverage piece. I think a lot of wisdom in that.

The third piece was I appreciate you mentioning this. I never thought about this way. There's a big difference between checking in versus checking up another big perspective shift.

And then I also appreciate the learning plan piece. I challenge everyone listening to this to come up with a learning plan.

That sounds awesome. That sounds like something people should focus on like right away. They should end this podcast and then figure out how do we even start where do we go to get that learning plan in place.

So those are my big takeaways. If anyone wants to contact you or they want to get more information on what you do, where's the best place they can go to get that information?

 

Stephanie Crowe (Learn.net)

Absolutely. So they can find me on linkedin, linkedin.com slash in slash stuff. Crow or certainly visit us at learn.net.

 

Matt Zaun

We'd love to connect. Perfect. I'll include that in the show notes. People just click and go from there. Thank you again.

I really appreciate your time today.

 

Stephanie Crowe (Learn.net)

Thanks for the great conversation, Matt. Take care.