Welcome back to another episode of Edup L&D. I'm your host, Holly Owens, and today's conversation is one I've been looking forward to for a while. After conquering some technical issues behind the scenes, I finally get the chance to sit down with Doctor Jennifer Berry, the CEO of Smartlab. Doctor Berry's journey is nothing short of inspiring. She went from the world of professional dance and retail management to becoming a powerful leader in education and STEM innovation.
In this episode, she shares how storytelling, curiosity, and drive to remove obstacles shaped her path to the CEO seat. We dive deep into Smartlab's mission of building STEM identity in learners, helping students believe they belong, master rigorous challenges, and understand that their ideas have
real impact. And trust me, whether you're a teacher or thinking about your next move, an LNB professional looking for a fresh perspective, or an inspiring leader with CEO dreams, you're going to walk away with practical wisdom and inspiration. So let's jump in. Here's my conversation with Doctor Jennifer Berry. Hi, we're Ice Spring, an international team of e-learning enthusiasts who help more than 60,000 clients across the globe succeed with better online learning.
Our two flagship solutions are Ice Spring Suite and Ice Spring Learn LMS ispring Suite is an intuitive, all in one authoring tool for creating engaging e-learning content, and ispring Learn is an innovative online training platform for onboarding, upskilling, and certifying your teams.
We also provide tons of free resources for aspiring and experienced e-learning professionals, conduct weekly webinars with top industry experts, and organize annual e-learning conferences, challenges, and championships. We'd be happy to get to know you and pick a solution that fits your needs best. Go to www.icepringsolutions.com to learn more about us, download our resources, and connect. Hello everyone, and welcome to another fabulous episode of Add
Up L&D. My name is Holly Owens and I'm your host. And I'm really excited today because I finally, finally, finally we got all the technical bad things out of the way. Get to talk to Doctor Jennifer Berry. She's the CEO with Smart Labs. So, Doctor Jennifer, welcome to the show. Thank you for having me Holly. I really appreciate your, your
time and your listeners time. And I know we had a little bit of technical challenges, but we wouldn't be a STEM organization if we didn't figure out those technical challenges. So. Exactly. We are steadfast. We, we don't let challenges, you know, block us. We, we, we figure it out and we move forward. So I'm excited to have you and
to learn more about you. So our audience is obviously made-up of like L&D, professional CEO's, founders, transitioning teachers, people who are still teachers in the classroom. So I would love for you to share your journey with the listeners. How did you become a CEO of Smartlab? I love this question. So I started early in my career. Well, first of all, I was a professional dancer so early in my career I did storytelling through a physical movement. So I am a physical movement
individual. I really believe in telling a story through your body. I also been in the performing arts theater world for some years. Everything from directing and choreographing and all of that. You know, after your body ages and you can't professional audience anymore, you have to go into choreography. Yeah. And I'm really passionate about especially young, young storytellers that want to tell stories through their bodies. I'm really passionate about that. So that was my early career.
And then through my college experience, I needed to get in state tuition at University of Arizona. And I decided to walk down the mall with a baseball hat and a sweatshirt, ask for applications in the mall and happened to meet a meet a bunch of men that were standing in front of the Gap store. And and they said to me, hey, not only we're going to give you an application, do you know that we're starting a management intern program for individuals?
Yeah, that are in their junior year of college. And this will be the first time that we do this intern program. And at the end of the program, we'll automatically give you a job and you can move to anywhere that you want, preferably San Francisco, where Gap was headquartered. Headquartered. And I was like, wait, me in this baseball hat and a sweatshirt? I'm just walking through the mall, but that sounds great. So here I joined Gap Inc and joined their management intern program.
It was the first intern program across for the company. And this was this was back in the 90s and so early. Of the 90s. Yeah, the 90s are the best, right? And this is when Gap was at their peak and really at the forefront of advertising and customer service and really branding themselves as something that was differentiated in the marketplace from the way in which they presented their product as well as how they joined the customer service atmosphere.
Although they mostly sold jeans and sweatshirts, they also differentiated themselves from their wow factor when you walked into a store and through their advertising. And so I got to learn a ton about every aspect of retail, spent 15 years of my career in retail. So from there I moved to San Francisco. I was store manager. I was, I worked at the corporate office for some years. I then worked in the field doing regional management and then district management.
So I really got to learn all facets of the retail business. And I got recruited one day by somebody that said, hey, we have this education company who is looking for retail heads, as we were called back in the day, back in the 90s, looking for retail heads. Because most of the individuals that have joined and started this amazing organization, this amazing education organization are educators. And so they need people to really understand customer
service. They need people to really understand leadership and leadership skills. And so they brought me in and I had just received my master's degree in public administration. So I was looking for something that really made me feel like I was computing and doing something bigger than myself. And so I, I gladly jumped into the, into the, the boat of the education field and have been there ever since. And I, and I really have been thoughtful and intentional about the roles I take.
I like to not only be able to give and be able to produce something from my talents to the organizations that I give, but I also really like to learn. I'm a real consummate learner and I really make sure that when I am in an environment, especially in an environment that is an education space, that I feel like I'm contributing, but I'm also learning. So I've done everything from the tutoring space that I started in, so the supplemental tutoring K through 8 tutoring space.
Then I did test prep. Then I moved over to a company that helped teachers become more effective in their craft. So focused on the students first and then moved to teachers and administrators to make them more effective in their craft. Then I moved into the special education. Well, first I went to the nonprofit space. I wanted to dip my toe into that space.
I spent five years in the after school space to really understand the the work that amazing educators to do do in that space to help students grow and develop and things outside of just the basic learning academic environment. And then I moved into the special education space, which was really a passion point from for me to really understand that niche market and what it takes for learners that need differentiated learning for their own, for their own unique
brains. So that was really amazing. And then recently, for the past year, I've been in this beautiful STEM space where I get to sort of bridge all of my learnings along the way. Into this Yeah, my. Passions of hands on, you know, project based learning all into one and that's been really, really exciting for me and I'm really happy to be here. What a journey, yeah. It's been really fun. Wow, Yeah, it sounds really fun. Yeah. And I'll tell you that we do
have sort of a commonality. I worked at Old Navy, which is learned by Gap, Yeah, when I was in college and I, you know, they were huge with the with the dog and all the different things. And like, I learned so much in that role, like just about like marketing, merchandising, like that wasn't what I was going to go into, but it was, it was a great learning experience for me to be in retail and like say customer service. That's definitely something that helps when you're in the, in
this space. So I love that we have that connection. And I'm a former high school teacher. So accessibility is very close to me in terms of like, you know, knowing all the different, like the 508, the the compliance. And of course, as an instructional designer, that's big to us too, and the people listening on the show. So I love that you dipped in all these different spaces. You kept quite the journey. Yeah. Thank you. You know, it's interesting.
When I decided to get my doctorate, I really looked for a doctorate program that was focused on leadership and change. And so you would see they had an amazing leadership and change degree and I dove head first because I and, and this is what we really focus on with our students at Smartlab too. I love to master rigorous challenges, right? And I love to look change in the face and look at hard things in the face and like figure out how
to remove boulders, right? My most of my career was in operations essentially before I became ACEO, as ACEO of many different organizations. And that was my passion point of figuring out what is the obstacle that gets in people's way to being effective, to be efficient, to be effective in their job and to be the best, best versions of themselves.
And that, that sort of like removing of obstacles and mastering rigorous challenges is something that's been really a passion point for me. And I love that I get to be a part of an organization that focuses on students and focuses on how they can own a STEM identity. And, and we define that smart lab STEM identity as a learner, self belief that they belong, they can master rigorous challenges and and their ideas make an impact.
And when you think about that, when I think about my journey and I sort of explore and, and do that reflective exercises that we do as we grow older, I really believe that all the things that got put in my way helped me gain my own STEM identity. Although I'm, I'm not in directly an S TEM field, I have STEM identity because I do believe I belong. I do believe I can master rigorous challenges and I believe I add value.
So that is what my wish is for all students across the country, whether they're in a smart lab or in a STEM environment, in their, in their, in their classroom, that they're really getting that self belief that they belong here. They can do this. They're future ready and they add value. I love that. Well, tell, tell the listeners who haven't heard of Smartlab like what it's all about. I love your, you know, your logo
is really cool. And I love the I love the little subtitle Learning is different here. That really resonates a lot, especially as a former educator. So tell us all about Smartlab, what you all do. I love already some of your philosophies, your goals, your connections, the things that you make with students and educators. So tell us all about it. Yeah, thank you. So Smartlab is an integrated ecosystem that sparks aha moments and build STEM identity
for learners. So many times when I first got here, everybody said, what does Smartlab do? And it's like, oh, we're a learning environment, we're a STEM learning environment. And I worked really hard with the entire staff because I believe that you get the best ideas from the people that are doing the work. To say, hire people smarter than you. For sure hire them and make sure they're around you at all times, right? Exactly. But I I, what I tried to do is really listen to the people that
worked here. You know, I did what I call listening tour. I listened to every single employee. I made an appointment with every single employee. I went out to every single school. Well, not every single, we have over 600, but I've got to a lot of schools. Yeah, I went to a lot of facilitators. I talked to a lot of students. I got on the floor with the students and played with the manipulatives that they were working with or the robots they were designing to understand
what really is it that we do? Sure, we put an environment in. Sure. We have. Amazing curriculum. Sure, we train the facilitators, but what really do we do? And what we really do is create. We manufacture a, an environment that gives that child the ability to, to have productive struggle.
And so when I talk about an integrated ecosystem, the ecosystem is really important because as we all know, as an ecosystems, integrity is out of whack as one of the components of the ecosystem is not optimized. And so we talked about 5 components of the ecosystem, the
customized learning environment. So whether the learning environment is a room, which Smartlab can absolutely design a full turnkey room, or you put it in the corner of a, of a multi purpose room, or teachers just build STEM into their their classrooms and, and, and use STEM applications and industry pathways to like merge whatever is being learned. However you do it, we believe in a customized learning environment that fits the school district.
So we will do consultative conversation as well as help design what that customized learning environment is to the school district. So that's one thing we do. We also make sure that we curate curriculum and the tools and equipment that is hands on on tools and equipment, career connected project based curriculum and really make sure that that's intentional within the customized learning
environment. And then we also not only train the facilitators that are going to be in these learning environments, but we create an environment that is sustainable, meaning we put them in professional learning learning communities. We ensure that there's extend trainings for them. It isn't just like we train you, we leave you, we're out right? We're we're more of the organization that says you matter almost the most out of all the components facilitator. And so our job is to make sure
you're set up for success. You're having your own aha moments. You yourself are are practicing and learning and really pushing your ability to put the best environments in front of are the best tools and equipments and goals in front of the students. And then of course, lastly, which I'm really proud of, is our support and partnership. So as an organization, we do what most do, which is we have a customer success team, We have a technical success team, of
course. But the partnership piece is really key. Because what I've heard from principals and superintendents and really even business leaders when they're thinking about helping fund these labs into schools is how do we ensure that this thing is sustainable? How do we make sure that people don't just purchase, yeah, purchase a bunch of stuff and then make it a a dusty storage
unit after? After overtime, a lot of the times like teachers are like all this Ed tech, you get Ed tech fatigue, like all this stuff being thrown at you and you just want, you want something that, like you said, that's sustainable and that can last and something that's really impactful throughout. Yeah, I agree. And I'm sure you've had many environments where you've had something that's sustainable and then something that the school district purchased they forgot about.
Yeah, absolutely. Or they purchased it without consulting with the educators. You know, I teach graduate level courses in instructional design and most of my students are K to 12 New York City public school teachers when they they have constant like feedback about when technologies are purchased and they're not consulted and then like how that just a bad experience for the. Kids a bad experience.
Yeah, I'm glad to hear that you're there the whole way through and and what you're doing to support. Yeah. And and we hope that they continue to stay with those professional learning communities. And we have a community that they can talk to other facilitators across the whole country. So they're also gaining skills. So they're not because again, as you know, when you're a STEM teacher, you're sometimes the only STEM teacher in that school or sometimes in the whole district.
And so there's a special education department and then there's the teachers and then there's the staff right to, and then there's you all by yourself. So we really try to make sure there's a community that people can reach out to and coordinate with and communicate with and talk and share and learn with each other. And that's part of the support for the facilitator that we give. But we also believe part of the sustainability is bringing the community into the environment,
right? When when parents and, and business leaders come in or, or employees of particular businesses come into the environments and tell their STEM identity journey, talk to the students about what careers are out there. Because every industry uses STEM applications, right? A lot of people think of STEM as just science, just technology, just engineering, just that. Pouring liquids out of graduated cylinders and making things, you know, blow up. Explode or building robots,
right? That's not only what STEM is, right? There is STEM applications in every single industry, right? You think of data collection and analysis, that's a STEM application. Data collection, analysis, pretty much every industry, agriculture, entertainment, sports, advanced manufacturing, I mean you could go on and think about all the industries, data collection and analysis is in all of those, right? So you know, mechanics and structures are in pretty much
every industry, right? Robotics and control technology, especially with this AI powered world that we live in, is in every industry. And so really giving those students that ability to take those STEM applications and align them to industry pathways I think is really key.
And bringing the community in to talk about that with students, I think is the magic because it isn't just about mastering A rigorous challenge like you, you build or you're trying to code this robot to go from point A to point B. And you're like, yeah, I did that. But what career is that it? How how is that thing that you just learned something that you can apply to a real industry?
That's really exciting. And we really make sure that we have avenues for bringing the community into the lab. In fact, on November 7th, we have what we're calling STEM Identity Day. We're going to have it not only in. Yeah, not, not only in every smart Lab, we'll have the STEM Identity Day, but also we'll have it in any school that wants to participate with us. So whether you're a Smartlab school or not, you're welcome to join us on November 7th for STEM Identity Day.
And so you can find free resources and contact us on our website in. Order. You will have all of that in the show. Notes yeah, all about in the show. Notes yeah, So you can learn more about STEM Identity Day and invite the community into your school to talk about. It's like an oversized career day, but connected to STEM identity and really challenge the community to come in and talk about their own semi identity and to talk about how it applies to their careers and their jobs.
Yeah. To make it free, all this is just connected to everything that we do. Yeah. You're connecting it to careers, you're connecting it to professional development, You're connecting it to building communities and building that space. And you mentioned AI, so I did have a question for you. And in terms of like students, you know, these students that are coming up are going to be living in a world that didn't, they don't know pre what it was
like. We know what it was like in the 90s without cell phones and AI and all that stuff we do. How are we going to prepare them for jobs and roles that currently don't exist? Because what's going to happen with AI? What is happening with AI? What's your take on that? Yeah, I've thought a lot about this and my team and I spend a lot of days and a lot of hours really grappling with what is our goal in helping students be prepared for the future, for the careers that to your point don't
exist yet. And we've, we've honed in on STEM identity because if you have STEM identity, whatever career you're in, whatever application or whatever AI is going to do. Today or tomorrow, that is not being done today, which will be many things because it's already at the speed of light training itself to do many things. If a student comes out on the other side of their learning journey with STEM identity as we've defined it so as we've defined it of a learner self belief that I belong.
I can master rigorous challenges and my ideas add value. Whatever's in front of them, they can be the ones that create those prompts, right? They can critically think about whatever AI is delivering and going, yeah, but is that actually solving the problem that we need? Or do we need to tweak this prompt? Or do we need to tweak what AI produced for us in order to solve the problem at large? They will think almost above what AI creates because what we're not going to get rid of as
humans, right? As much as people are very worried and scared that there's going to be robots out there. I know there's even like controversy about students dating robots, right? All this. Is. Happening. I know it's pretty scary out there.
However, it is scary. However, we have a responsibility as educators and as adults to ensure that the students are fearful that AI just does things for them, but instead knows that it can do stuff for them, but knows they're smarter than the machines, Knows that they can master master the rigorous challenges better than the AI can do it for them. Because we all use AI. I'm sure you do. I know I use it.
Every day. Every day and I'm ensuring that I'm using it for good and challenging when it spits something out like I'm not sure I gave it the right question. Or or. Wow, that didn't actually say the thing that I was trying to say, right? So, but because I have STEM identity, right, I believe I can master rigorous challenges because I've proven that in my
life over and over, right? I've failed hard many different times over and so giving students in that controlled environment the ability to fail and to be OK with that, whatever answer they come up with is the answer right? To not be like, there's only one answer to this problem.
That ability to do that Yum from kindergarten all the way through, right is really important because the more they learn how to fail, the more they learn how to sit in discomfort of not knowing answers and or celebrate when they come up with something, something that was new and novel that no teacher or adulthood ever thought of. The more they do that, the more when they come out the other side of their education journey, they'll be able to be smarter than the AI world.
That's power. And I don't mean smarter from an intellect standpoint, but smarter from their capacity to think above it, right? To be able to say great AI can do that. But I am the one that can critically think. I am the one that can master rigorous challenges. I am the one that is OK with productive struggle and I sit in comfort actually in productive struggle struggle. So we believe that STEM identity is actually even more important than learning how to code right?
Like we actually teach kindergarteners. How to codes for you now? AI codes for you. That's what I was going to say. We teach kindergarteners how to do basic coding, right? And what we said to ourselves is like, oh, but AI is going to do that. Why do kindergarteners need to learn it? But instead, what we've spun on it is instead of we still want the kindergarteners to learn how to put the green down for go and put the red down for stop and yellow for paws, right?
So they understand the process. But instead we're teaching them to think about, OK, let's talk about a career application. This is for five year olds, right? Let's think about a career application. Your job is to get a, a car, right? That you are going to have self driving from the farm to the, to the, the, the market from the farm to the, to the house, right
to deliver to the house. And so your job is to create this self driving car that can get from point A to point B. So whether you create it or AI creates it, we want you to create it because you're going to learn how like when you put the red down, it stopped and it didn't make the right turn that you wanted it to do, right? So you understand that.
So you understand the coding, basic coding for kindergarteners, but more importantly that there's a way to design A car to get farm to table, right? And that there's a career in that, right? So that's really what we push in on, which is the STEM application that connects to careers. Not necessarily that we're teaching you to code because again, AI is going to teach you to code. But what AAI can't teach a student is how to fail.
And what AI can't teach a student is how to critically think through a problem and and figure out a way to solve the problem, right? Because in the future, kids are going to be like, OK, I see the problem, this is the way I want to solve it. OK, I'll just have AI do that for me. But that's good. But if they haven't thought of the problem and they hadn't thought of the solve, AI is just going to sit there and wait for you to give it to prompt. Exactly.
It's it needs you to, it needs you to solve the problem and put in the information. Absolutely. And I think all of what you're doing really makes me think about application. Like application is something where you have to try something and you fail about. It's like trial and error when you get to that point of the blooms, if we're talking about Bloom's taxonomy in that point, like the higher order thinking skills, you definitely have to
fail and feel fail safe. I think that's something like, you know, probably when we were growing up, that wasn't something that existed necessarily like this environment where you could fail. Like if you didn't get 100% on the quiz, it was like the recall. It's like, what's wrong with you? You know, like what's wrong with you? Why can't you remember that? You know, whatever Napoleon did and it's just crazy stuff. It's. Crazy stuff. Yeah. You know, it makes me think of
this story. So I was, when I first joined Smartlab, I was out talking to friends of mine and thinking about like, what is how did you get into a STEM field or how did you get into not a STEM field, but use STEM applications in your field? And I was just asking a lot of my friends, my peers, their stories, because I believe stories helped me root into who we are as an organization beyond
the stuff we sell, right? Because that's a very important to me that our mission is really being accomplished and we're optimizing on what our goal is for students. And one particular woman told me now she is in the STEM field, she's a doctor. I asked her, tell me about the first time you remember that feeling of I want to be a doctor. And she told me this really fascinating story. It's a little gory. So here you go. Not gory, but it was great.
She was, she said she was about. A gory Warner Brother was in the. Yeah, yeah, yeah. She was 8 years old. Her brother was in the backyard. She was watching television, and her brother fell out of a tree. And she heard him fall out of a tree, and she heard him screaming. Right. So she's 8, and they're home alone because, you know, back in the 80s, people were home alone. And when they were kids.
Yeah, exactly. I had my key around my neck, Right. And she ran outside and her brother was laying on the ground and his phone was sticking out the side of his leg. And she was like in a panic at 8, right? This is the story she's telling me. She was like, I was in a panic. I looked down and the tree had fallen out of there was a branch that fell down with him. So I grabbed the branch, I stuck it on his leg and I found a hose that was right there.
And I wrapped the hose and the branch and pushed his bone back into his leg and wrapped it right. Then I ran in, called, called my parent, they called the, you know, 911911 came and it basically saved his leg. And she goes, from that moment on, she had my identity because she was like, oh, I reacted, I knew what to do. I kind of looked at the problem and I solved the problem. And from then on, she had STEM identity and then had passion to be a, a doctor, right? That's her journey.
I thought about that story and I thought, you know, what could we at Smartlab do so that people don't have to wait till their brother falls out of a tree? To figure it out. Yeah, like something tragic, you know, it could have been worse. Yeah, because many kids are sitting and playing video games
all day, right. So they don't actually have that ability to go out there and explore and get hurt and figure out how to solve it. Or, you know, they're not, they're not as outdoors as we used to be when we were were children and, and alone like we were when we were children, right? I find a lot. I have a 10 year old and I'm constantly letting her just go be outside. And many of my peers are like, do you know where she is? Does she have a smart watch?
And I'm like, no, I we're in a STEM organization and she doesn't have a smart watch. She doesn't have a phone. And I just know that I've given her boundaries and I want her to go explore the world and to like come be bored and to maybe. Come on. Skin a knee skin a knee right and know that like she can be OK without me jumping to putting new stuff on it a Band-Aid right so she can figure it out.
But the story that my friend told me about her journey as a, as become her STEM identity, become a doctor really made me think about that's our job at Smart Lab is to manufacture environments for folks for, for students that, that they can have those aha moments, right? That sudden realization that occurs right when they connect things in new and meaningful ways that like sudden realization that they go, oh, if I put this here and I wrap this here, right, without it actually
being broken. If we manufacture those environments, then we're giving those students that STEM identity in a manufactured way. And that those moments of STEM identity will then serve them in their future, whether they become a doctor, or they become ACEO, or they become a podcast host and a teacher, whatever they choose, that STEM identity can really serve them in this AI powered world. Love that, love that and and that wasn't too gory of a story, I mean. I know, I know, but some people
don't like to hear. About yeah, I know they're like they, yeah. I don't, I don't really get the egg. But yeah, that's a really great story. And as we're coming up on the end of the episode here, I think one of the things I would love for you to do is we have a lot, we have a variety of different people in our audience. Like I told you, mostly L&D professionals, people looking to transition possibly out of the classroom, do their own thing, have their own business, be a
CEO. So if you could give them like 3 pieces of advice on like how they could potentially do that, like some takeaways for them, I'm sure they would love to hear that coming from you and your vast experience and the, and the journey that you told us about the beginning of the episode. So what would be 3 pieces of advice? Let's say if they wanted to be ACEO at A at a edtech company, Yeah. Thank you for that question. I appreciate it. The first thing I'd say is be
curious. I have found that I've always been curious. And what I mean by that is don't be afraid to ask people questions. Find another CEO, call me, find me on LinkedIn, Doctor Jennifer Berry, find me on LinkedIn, reach out and say, can you meet with me for 10 minutes, 15 minutes, an hour and just share with me your journey. What were some of the hard parts? What were some of the the pain
points that you experienced? And I think that curiosity of asking other people how they got somewhere is key. I also would say the second thing is take jobs or assignments that you're not expecting anything from, right? Meaning you're not expecting a title change, you're not expecting more money, you're expecting to learn, you're expecting to gain skills, you're expecting to fail and maybe not be the smartest person in the room.
I have found through my whole journey when I just sort of took on a role without any expectation, I then magically was given that role. And I don't know if it was magic, just maybe prove myself. And then people said, right. And I talk a lot about this with women, young women leaders that are yearning to be CE OS because even to this day, there's not a ton of women CE OS out there, right?
And I believe that I had to force myself to push down that imposter syndrome, force myself to push down that I don't really know how to be that role, whatever that role was, that was my next part of my journey. Or I may be not good enough that I just forced myself to just try it. Be uncomfortable, be uncomfortable. Yeah. And so that would be my second piece. The first one being be curious.
The second one is just put yourself in environments, put take on roles, take on assignments without expectation other than learning, other than gaining skills. That would be my second piece of advice. And then my last piece of advice is to root yourself in the mission of whatever your, whatever your value set is, right? I spend a lot of time in my early career watching my parents follow their passion, right?
My dad's an actor. He runs a theater in Los Angeles. My mother's a flight attendant. She's passionate about traveling and would come home and tell me about all these amazing travel stories and these amazing different cultures that she got to experience and really got me
out of my own 4 walls. And that sort of lens and perspective of learning about the world through my mom's travels, learning about the world through my dad's storytelling of other people's stories as a theater, theater guy really helped me see the world bigger than myself. And so in that they kept reminding me, what is your value? What are you passionate about? What are you here to do in this world that's bigger than
yourself? And so I've always tried to really root everything I've chosen, even the retail days, right? I tell my story. If they look good, they feel good. If they and if they feel good, they're contributing to this world in a positive way, right? And so like I've always rooted whatever I've done in my own value set.
So that would be my third piece of advice that whatever passion point you have, if you're looking to get out of something and into something else, or you're looking at being an innovator and starting a new company, or if you're looking to just become better at the current craft you're in and not looking for something new, but better at the current craft. Root yourself in your own value set and really look at like, what is the mission that I'm about? What it, what am I trying to change?
And go deep on that, right? Like Smartlab, we sell stuff, but I am rooted in what is the goal? What are we trying? The bigger picture here. What is the bigger picture here? And I think that as any leader, whether you're starting in your career or you're at the top of your game, you should always be pushing yourself to ensure that you're moving the needle on something in a positive way. It contributing to this world that's hard right now. It's hard. This environment that we're in
right now is hard. There's a lot of, you know, social media and the news and our political landscape has created a lot of fear and, and polarization. And so how do you step above that and be on light to to make this world a better place? And I think that that would be my third piece of advice. Really look at your own value set and then make sure you're rooted in the mission and everything you do. I love it. Great, 3 great pieces of advice that we haven't heard before.
Very awesome. I can't thank you enough for coming on the show and sharing about your your journey, Smartlab, your advice, all the different things. I know this is definitely going to resonate with a lot of people in our audience, so thank you so much for coming up on the show. Thank you, Holly. I'm glad we made it work and it was so nice meeting with you. No. Technical issues, we did great. We did great.
And everything is going to be in the show notes about how to connect with Doctor Jennifer Berry, find Smartlab, all the different things to go to the show notes and you can find that information. So thanks again. Thank you. Talk to you soon, all bye. Thanks for spending a few minutes with Holly. She knows your podcast queue is packed.
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