437 — How to build engagement with your content libraries (Rebroadcast) - podcast episode cover

437 — How to build engagement with your content libraries (Rebroadcast)

Mar 25, 202540 minEp. 437
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Summary

Martin Ritchie from Virgin Money shares strategies for driving engagement with digital learning content libraries. He discusses proactive promotion, consistent messaging, and tailoring content to user needs. The episode also covers practical techniques such as single sign-on, easy content access, and leveraging internal communication channels.

Episode description

Digital learning content offers a scalable, always-on option to help your people build their skills and overcome workplace challenges. But often these libraries get dusty, bogged down by out-of-date content with little relevance, or hidden away in a dark corner of the intranet where no one can find them. 

So in this episode of The Mindtools L&D Podcast, Virgin Money’s Martin Ritchie, Digital Learning Manager, joins Ross Garner and Lara to share:

  • How Virgin Money raise awareness of their Mind Tools content library; 

  • Techniques for promoting a proactive learning mindset; 

  • ‘Push’ vs ‘pull’ learning. 

During the discussion, Ross referenced a recent academic paper: Albarracín, D., Fayaz-Farkhad, B., & Granados Samayoa, J. A. (2024). Determinants of behaviour and their efficacy as targets of behavioural change interventions. Nature Reviews Psychology, 1-16. 

In ‘What I Learned This Week’, Ross discussed ‘pebbling’, as covered by The Guardian

For more from us, including access to our back catalogue of podcasts, visit mindtools.com/business. There, you'll also find details of our award-winning performance support toolkit, our off-the-shelf e-learning, and our custom work.  

 

Connect with our speakers 

If you'd like to share your thoughts on this episode, connect with us on LinkedIn: 

Transcript

Hey listeners, Ross D here. There's no new episode of the Mind Tools L&D podcast this week, but fear not. We'll be back with some fresh new beats next Tuesday. In the meantime, we wanted to re-release an episode we recorded last year with Martin Ritchie from Virgin Money, focusing on driving engagement with digital learning.

We thought this episode would pair nicely with the conversation we had last week with Rosemary Hoskins, where we discussed content libraries and the line between too much content and just enough. Hope you enjoy it. We'll see you again next week. L&D podcast application. Garner and this week we are and overcome workplace challenges. these libraries can by how to protect content with little relevance, or how to know One organization. tremendous job. as for RG Money's content later.

are broadly affected. So if you have a content like that. Welcome, Martin Ritchie, to add virgin money to the selamat menikmati Marty can you tell us a bit about your role and what you call it the learning hub, what is that? Yeah, sure. So yes, thanks for having me on. So my role is digital learning manager and I do many things. I thought we've only got so much time, so I'll tell you the main three that we do. I'm responsible for. first of all delivering the bank-wide compliance learning.

Obviously, banking regulation is quite far and wide, so we need to help keep customers and colleagues safe in that environment, so I take charge of that.

Supplier management is a big part of my role as well. So looking after and promoting... Excellent to that, Martin. Thank you. So looking after and promoting our range of learning software. So whether that's learning management systems, content libraries... our authoring software and also spend a bit of time sort of defining and delivering on our learning strategy and giving support to the learning professionals across Virgin Money.

in terms of what Learning Hub is as a content library. Yeah, perfect. And so then the version of MindTools that you use, you call it the Learning Hub internally. So maybe you could explain a little bit about what that is and how you use it. Yeah, so the Learning Hub is a content library that's full of digital learning focusing on... various personal skills. So whether you want to learn something about building your leadership skills or enhancing your communication, empathy, time management.

There's too many topics to name, but there's also some cool content in there on ways of working like data and agile, and when colleagues go into it. They can filter by how they like to learn. So whether they like to listen or... you know, see a video or whatnot, and then by how long they have to learn. So really it's a tool that's on 24-7 for colleagues. So when they encounter a problem, they can go into the content library and find a solution. Yeah, perfect.

Lots of organizations buy content library and then it never gets used. I think this is one of the trends we see across all of our mind tools enterprise. customers, the ones who get the best usage, are the ones who promote it and really put a focus on that. If you just turn a content library on and expect people to go there, that tends not to work. And in fact, the Virgin Money Learning Hub.

is one of the most used iterations of our MindTools platform. So I'm curious how you pitch that internally. Okay, yeah, so pitching the Learning Hub is something that requires a lot of... thought, time and effort. So it's really about what you say, how you say it, why you say it, when you say it and how often you say it. So I often think about all those things.

You know, the easy option is always just to grab a content library, do a nice rebrand, do some alcoholic comms, do a few lunch and learns, and then, you know, leave people on their own devices. And, you know, that'll give you a nudge. But it won't generate stickiness in my experience. So I find to grab that stickiness. with the libraries you need to get in front of people at the next layer down and spend some time with them and take them on that storytelling journey.

just to give you some context of what we do like we we know that our colleagues are very busy but they're curious you know which is great so when you get in front of them it's about utilizing that time to um essentially craft your message and get that over. So what we find works really well is creating a learning session. So our one's called Learning Hub 101. And that really sells the benefits. why they should learn the benefits of learning.

and the easiest way to get what they need quickly when they jump in the platforms. And what we do is we pitch that to every colleague who joins the business. So we've been really consistent the last two or three years, every single person that joins Virgin Money. We'll get the session because we want to get them early and get that learning bug ignited in them from data so they know where to go when they experience challenges.

We do open that same session for existing colleagues. So we run that quarterly now so colleagues can sign up and experience that same thing. And what's really interesting is I've been starting to talk to people now this month that maybe came on like a year or two years ago and they're like, I can't remember what you said, you know, what's available. So, you know, people forget and that's okay, that's normal.

But what we also try and do is, I like to call it being a positive nuisance. So at the end of all these sessions, I'd be like, do you want me to come to your team and do this? Because the more people you can get in front of, And if you speak passionately about it and you generate that burning bug within them, you'll get invitations to team meetings.

So that session that we've built, that's applicable for five people to 500 people. It can be done virtually or face-to-face, so it sits on the shelf, ready to go, and we update every so often. And so we feel that that time with people more than just the corporate comms, which are great and they have a purpose. But you need to go level down and get in with people and understand their why, for why they should do learning and use digital learning. Alongside that, we also pitch to...

We have colleague network groups, so we'll spend time with them to have them understand how we can help. So we have banners, we have playlists. We have content and we'll ask for their engagement plans. So what are you planning to do this year? So it might be Black History Month or Pride Month or... Last year we did a brilliant playlist on managing the menopause. That was our most popular one last year. So looking for various, you know.

initiatives like this with colleague network groups and also campaigns and internal comms. So what are they doing and where could learning fit into it? And I think if you can get your comms and your internal learning. together then you build a better learning culture so essentially we pitch it fairly simply but we're consistent and we do it often and it's always a thing you do so i'll aim to do like 20 to 30.

bespoke team meetings so you're essentially um and you're just keeping on the cycle going so So that's a bit about how the country is. Yeah, and I think kind of key, what you're saying there is, because we experienced it a bit on this podcast, I feel like we talk about the Bindjust product. all the time, but a lot of listeners who I then meet in person tell me that they have no idea.

what MindTools does. So I think because you're talking about it all the time, you feel like you're being annoying or just wanging on with the same stuff being boring. But actually, for people who are receiving that message, you can't say it often enough. You want to keep banging that drum all the time because they're not noticing every time that you talk about it. They've got a hundred other things on. So you want to make sure you're all at the forefront of people's mind.

I'm most really interested, like colleagues who come on the sessions, they all say consistently, this is brilliant, there's almost too much now, you know, it's the best kept secret. So actually, you know, when you're going out and doing these, People generally find it valuable and they just need reminding every so often. And that's normal human behaviour. You get caught up in the business of work and life and you sometimes forget what's right in front of you, don't you?

Yeah. Yeah. Just to add to that, what you were saying about the human behavior. And although you say that it takes a lot of time and thought. effort, it does show when you're actually trying to prove your return of investment because you are getting the engagement and you can see it in the stats and you can see it in the feedback. and what you're saying about getting new users on board. from the get-go. A lot of people will come into a new organisation, they're already really overwhelmed with

like proving that they got the job for the right reasons and learning new systems and learning all of their teammates' names and what everybody does. And if you start plugging in that they've got all of those resources, to help them with that, that then will help them. throughout their whole career with that organization because then it just becomes habitual.

Whereas if you try and get somebody to engage, maybe they've been in the organization for like two years, it's a lot harder to kind of tap into their already very solid working patterns. whereas if you can start planting those seeds really really early on and keep the momentum going and keeping it refreshed and that will always always keep them coming back come coming back for more and it's also as well as like

A lot of people might come onto the platform or come onto any content library and be overwhelmed straight away because they don't know how to use it. They don't know. like when to use it and most importantly they don't know why they should be using it and that is something that I talk about a lot is kind of promoting the reasons as to why they should be engaging.

with the content because it'll help them not just from a professional kind of working standpoint but also just being a human being standpoint because we've got so much content around mental health and time management. all of the personal life stuff too, which reflects in business life. I think that's what we were talking about more in terms of the... People are often not very good at knowing what they don't know. The self-directed learner is...

kind of an aspiration rather than something that you see an awful lot of. But in the way that you were talking about things like Black History Month or dealing with the menopause or, you know, another phrase you used was it's there when you have a challenge. You're positioning resources so that they're aligned with the things that are going on within the wider business rather than pushing your own agenda. And I think that sounds like one of the most important things. Yeah.

Yeah, you almost need to find every bus and jump on it, you know, and kind of go from there. And you're always scanning, like, yes, I have the day job that I need to get going. you're always keeping your eyes a bit wider about what's going on in the business. Where can we marry up an opportunity to speak about digital learning? And maybe not even explicitly all the time, sometimes it's just a really good piece of content.

in amongst an article um and that's that's our door and you know you don't need to be you know in people's faces all the time, you can do it separately as well. Yeah, and it's not just an opportunity for you to be promoting the content library, it's an opportunity for the end customer, so your users or your partners throughout the business, to help them do their jobs better. So you're criticizing, how can you make that thing that they're working on easier to achieve?

So we often talk on this podcast about pool versus push techniques for building a learning culture. So we can push resources at colleagues, end users, learners, whatever you want to call them. through emails. So we do a regular email with our product. or by directing colleagues to specific resources. And Marty, you talked a little bit about that in terms of the playlists and embedding content in other programs that are running and that kind of thing.

But we also want to give our learners agency to pool the resources that are most useful to them. So that's more like when they have a development, they want to develop a skill or they have a challenge. That second part really requires a proactive learning mindset from the end user. How do you encourage this? Yeah, it comes back to that session I spoke to earlier where...

The first 10 minutes of that call, we don't jump into the platform. We find if we do that, then we don't get stickiness. But what we do is we check and challenge people. perceptions and ideas of learning and their learning mindset and where we go from there. So I suppose to answer the question, I'll give you like a quick run through of some of the things that we cover.

We start off because digital learning isn't a term that lots of colleagues just know naturally, like they understand learning at home. You know, so I often use an example of my brother needs to be pressured. I can never remember which file it is, so I jump on YouTube, I find my video, I know which files, good, I've got it. So that's the whole concept of digital learning, you know, and the flow of work, as it were. You find a challenge, you get your solution, off you go again.

So I start off by defining digital learning. what it isn't and what it is. So I start off by saying, you know, it's not death by PowerPoint, you know, digital learning or, you know, it's not, you know, going off site, you know, to a hotel with a lovely buffet. You know, that's the main thing you remember. And it's not someone else's responsibility. It's kind of bringing that back to them that you're in control of where you want to develop and where you want to learn.

And we often say, you know, yeah, your people leader is a great influence and a great help. So, you know, they can be a part of that, but it should be mainly driven by you. Then I start saying, what is it? So it's quick and easy to find and consume. It's simple to read and understand. It fits the time you have available and it's relevant to how you like to learn.

So coming back to that learning style of I prefer podcasts or I prefer animations or actually I'm an old school reader and I really like that. Brilliant. I've got you covered. So we kind of start using that language. You can absolutely have some fun with it. I was really proud of one where I've used a page of memes to understand what it is. So we've got some Futurama memes, some more federal ones. And it kind of keeps it lighthearted, you know, so we're not preaching at people.

But then we get context on why learning is so important. So how learning open doors improves your confidence. It can help you in your next career role. We speak about the half-life of skills being so short these years, these days.

you know, in five years, you know, what will your skills look like? Which ones will still be relevant? And help them understand on the big picture. You know, that's not always just today and immediate now, but, you know, in five years, what skills do you need? Do you know what skills may be? at this point absolutely nobody knows yeah you've got to be horizon scanning though and you've got to be thinking about this or short medium a long-term view to that absolutely

Yeah, definitely. Then I challenged the concept. So when we did a survey last year that that showed that colleagues' biggest barrier to learning or perceived barrier was time. We see that all the time. Whenever we run the service, that's always across the board. Across the board, it's time. So I challenge them on...

You know, we all have a minute and a day to get started, you know. And what would life look like if instead of learning time being the first thing to drop when it got busy, what if that's the first thing you fiercely protected? You know, and how would that look different? I don't get answers from them. I just, you know, push the question out and let them marinate it on it for a bit. Plant the seed. Yeah, plant the seed, absolutely, and come back through.

I always think of that what you mean by learning. If you ask, do you have time to learn at work? Most people are going to say, no, I'm too busy doing my job. for that if you ask them what do you do when you come across an unfamiliar challenge or problem

Probably say, oh, well, I Google it or I'll ask my manager or whatever. Well, that is learning, right? You are learning something there. It's just been framed slightly differently, but it's not the way that most people think about learning because their experience of learning is normally. more formal structure. school, college, you know, whatever it might be.

You know, I had a challenge last week. I had a difficult conversation with someone and I looked at this thing for five minutes. I watched a five-minute video on the MindTools site on kind of how you might ask questions to kind of understand where the other person is coming from. I work with a lovely team. I don't have to have a lot of difficult conversations, but it was really useful to have that when I did need it. I'm about to quit for next week. Rise on mindset shift.

It is, yeah, definitely. And I kind of talk about that, you know, from learning at home. Most of us have it nailed that we will get what we need, how we need it, and we Google it. And it's building that mindset into work. the digital learning platforms you know that's your internal giggle essentially and and even that you see the light bulbs going off in people's head they're like oh okay um so it's always a good it's always a good line to use um and then we talk about um

the collaborative and the power of collaborative learning so sometimes learning and what I'm learning can sometimes feel like a secret you know it's like we don't often share you know I'm working on this that or the other so I really encourage them to As a team, share what you're learning. Ask for feedback on how it's going.

and get different perspectives on maybe a piece of content that you've seen, you know, and build that collaborative learning muscle because that'll just benefit the team in totality as well. So that's kind of the main sort of crux of the intro 10 minutes that we do, that we think. lets them know what good looks like challenges i think in a little bit and gives them pots for thought on actually how do i what do i think about learning you know and how important is it in my daily week

What is my rhythm? Should I have a rhythm? Yes, you should. What is that? And if I don't have it, let's go and make one as a team individually.

that's kind of where we start to push digital learning is not a term that most people use because uh you know the three of us on this podcast are steeped in this stuff we talk about digital learning all the time and it can be difficult to get out of get out of your own mindset to realise that most people are busy and don't actually have time for such things.

Yeah. Or it's just under a big banner of learning. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Just actually like on that as well as I've had to catch myself sometimes to make sure that I'm practicing what I'm preaching. As well as if things are getting busy internally and externally, I sometimes need to catch myself.

to like even like look at maybe something around like time management but i have to like plug that into my brain to be like all of that stuff is there for me to to use and again kind of going back to like what i was saying about it being habit People saying that they look on Google if they need something. That's a habit. That's just been programmed into the human race. So it's trying to shift that to, as Marty said, using the content platform.

for Virgin Money using the MindTools platform as that internal Google because it's also going to find find you what you need a lot quicker that is what we do we want to make sure that we're getting people to what they need as soon as possible because if it's gonna take eight clicks to find what they want they're probably gonna disengage after click number four I'll come back to it later

and whether or not they do is a different question and so it's making sure that like it's there and it's ready and when they type in time management for example it will come up with very relevant resources all in different formats which will help very like individual learners rather than if you just do on google and you have to go to page 24 to actually find

what you're looking for. So that time element, because as we said, people across the board are time poor. I work on the product team here, and I think what you're alluding to, Lara, is that we have a different... set of metrics that we're working towards than the kind of stuff that you might find just freely on the internet where basically we want people to spend as little time on the product.

as possible in a way you know it's uh we want people to find the answer quickly and then be able to apply that at work whereas if you are um basing your revenue on how long you're keeping people on the page

then there's a tendency to waffle on for paragraphs and paragraphs, and then there's lots of ads, and eventually you get to find, which is why when you look at recipes online, all you actually want is the ingredients and the method, but you have to scroll past or, you know. I just want the one, two, three. page to go through the person's personal life story and how to discover the recipe before you actually can get to it.

Mario, I want to talk about practical techniques for promoting the platform. And by practical, I'm really thinking of a recent... paper an academic paper that we've talked about quite a lot on this podcast and um in our newsletter the lnd dispatch newsletter as well which basically looked at how do you What kind of behaviour change interventions have the biggest impact on what people actually do? And a behaviour change intervention might be...

like a workshop or it could be doing a post-it somewhere to remind people on an awareness campaign or something. And the thing that absolutely had the biggest impact was access. Like if you make it easy to do something, you make it the default.

People will naturally go that way. But with the slightest bit of friction, they will go and do the different things. So the example they use in the paper is like COVID vaccinations. The biggest predictor of whether someone got COVID vaccination was there being a vaccination site nearby. So I'm wondering, how do you very practically make it easy for people to access digital resources? Yeah.

put it on the internet, the first page of an internet. It seemed like a really obvious one, but essentially it's right there. And I make that really visible. in terms of other things that we do. I often find that it's educating other relevant teams. to make content from the Learning Hub kind of part of their daily life. And so them and colleagues are looking at various things. I'll give you an example. of skilling in L&D communities. So we've got a range of L&D professionals across the business.

He's not always been the best. curating rather than creating. So... And essentially, we've been upskilling them to say that all this content is here. And when you're creating your training courses, et cetera, et cetera, I want you to curate bits from here and bring it in. to the courses that people go on and whether that's face-to-face or digital or whatever it may be, embed it everywhere because it saves you a job because it's already been...

built by Minetools and Petit, etc. So, you know, find something that's useful and solves the problem so that you don't have to go and create it. And we're seeing that kind of permeate across all the various learning teams. So colleagues are then seeing this as a normal, you know, oh, it's normal. I go and spend five minutes looking at this video and then we'll come back and discuss.

And the more they see that and the more they embed it, it'll become more normal for colleagues to go, I've got my own problem. I wonder if there's something there. So that's the first thing. I've already spoken about internal comms. If you can find the article in something relevant, again, that's a total inclusion to there.

Learning at Workweek or similar initiatives like that. We use the theme of learning power this year to remind everyone of what's available. So every content library we have, what's in the LMS, et cetera. And again, that's on the homepage of our internet. We created a playlist, or Lara and Lee created a playlist, which is amazing. So, you know, making use of your partners is always a good thing to do as well. And we saw an increase of 32% in visitors for that week.

so if you give up, people will come, which is brilliant. Again, colleague networks, but there's more subtle things you can do as well. I kind of titled this one Forced Fun. where we're not forcing people to go in and use it but if there's a great example there was a really good one that was highlighted on how books can help you become a better manager that went out and I asked three or four colleagues

Would you mind going in and commenting on some professional books that you've read or non-professional that are just really good reads and start the conversation in the comments? Because I think that's one of the harder things to get is really good engagement in your comment section.

and from that first you need to see other people doing it first so you don't want to be the first it looks like it's getting used so we got fear for and then I think by the end of it we had 20 to 30 comments in there with a whole range of books that and then promote that in Teams channels. So we have our health and safety site that's got a reading order in there. So colleagues are interested in reading that. I was like, hey, check out this thing over here. And then people come back into it.

and looking at your data as well. I think if you have a sound understanding of your data, when do people go into it? When does it drop off? During the week, for example, how many new people are here? How many of those new people stay and come back? How many don't come back? Where do they live? And that really helps you. what little tweaks you can make in your rhythms for promoting the Learning Hub. And I also find that that is the key to this, is little tiny tweaks, but often.

you know if you stay the same then it will gradually drift down. But if you make small tweaks that are achievable or noticeable and continue the momentum and people see a slightly different context of Learning Hub being promoted or used. then it just builds that engagement. So that's kind of some of the thoughts I have. I'm sure Lana's got more.

yeah well just what you were saying with the the stats like everything with the drip feeding it's it's so important because if you overwhelm people they'll just be like no but the drip feeding just keeps their attention and what you were saying with the new users and everything that you've been doing in turn

to like put it right front and center so people can't miss it again that is getting people to what they need as soon as possible um but even with like your active users from h1 so january till January to June last year compared to January to June this year you've had a 17% increase in active users and a 100% increase in your new year.

there's the things like the email the email the weekly email that goes out so that again that is like that that way of drip feeding and you've got your fuel your curiosity newsletter as well so there's kind of those two comms going out but used slightly for different things but using the content for the sit link is the same content.

And when we did that email change so that it looked like it was coming from Virgin Money, there was an 82%, on average, an 82% increase in people engaging with that newsletter. so again it's just like that kind of like what's new and with those weekly emails they're tailored to that individual So it's like coming through what is recommended for them as an individual user and I think that that is what's really important. And when people use the platform, again, it's tailored to them as a learner.

put that as well as all of the things that you're doing. with plugging in links and to share that is like so huge as if it can open really valuable conversations so that like if there is a article for example on the my tools platform and someone comments and says oh I really found this useful

you are more likely than not going to have people that are like, I found that too. And oh, did you actually notice that this was actually really interesting? And again, it opens up that valuable safe space for people to kind of... discuss and resonate with each other which again kind of builds that sense of community by using the content as that kind of that pillar.

So I want to mention two more things, which I think you both sort of, you're both kind of talking about without using the term. And I think it's probably because it might seem so obvious that you don't even think about it anymore. But one is single sign-on. So when you get that, you see a link to Mindtools or in an email or in a program or whatever it might be, you click on it and the user gets authenticated through without having to put in a password.

So if you're using a digital learning library and you just have to print a password, you're going to lose some users every single time. Not lose some losers, lose some users. Every single time they get asked to pay the password, some people are going to drop off. And then the other piece is, and again, you're both talking about it, is you can access content with one click. So when you get an email, you click a link.

and you get to the content. What you don't have to do is enroll in that content which then triggers an alert which then you need to click something else and sometimes you can end up with sort of four or five different clicks. to actually see the thing you want to see you want to make it as easy as possible for people to get to that piece of content as soon as possible because every time they have to click

of them are going to drop off. Yeah when you say that you lose some users if you don't have SSO it's actually quite it's quite substantial how many users you lose if you go for the username. So the number I've heard is 60% but I don't want it. That kind of fall apart because as human beings we hate usernames and passwords. We hate them. And then having to do the whole forget your password, like we've lost them. They're gone. But they're gone.

We'll try again next time. But with the SSO, yeah, it's absolutely and we work very closely with your IT teams and it's all very safe. process so that yeah every single time that link is clicked it takes them straight and then that starts feeding into your usage. If you get the username and password even if people just go to the home page and then they don't go anywhere. and then their session times out, they're gonna have to do the whole thing again, which is just another hurdle.

So SSO is key. Alright, so... Loads of ideas there around workshops, technical stuff. regular communication involving people throughout your network. encouraging community, really cool stuff. I hope that is useful to anyone regardless of what content library that they have. But if you listen to this and want to see what the mind tools content library has to offer, then you can. Our content library is available too.

everyone who has an internet connection. It includes access to thousands of management and leadership as well as our new Skillvice courses which leverage space practice. build key workplace skills over time. If you want to get sent And you can support this show along the way. There you can get 15% off your monthly annual or three by entering the code podcast. are also available. Virgin Monday have an enterprise to 200 other organizations.

Everyone in the business a subscriber or want to This offer is only use with any other offer. One last time. the discount code. we picked up over the Lara, do you want to go first? Yes, I can. We had a lunch and learn session internally where one of our colleagues was discussing the topic of clean language. When I first went on to it, I thought it was just going to be told that we can't swear in conversations. That's what I immediately took from clean language.

but it's actually like so interesting and as soon as I kind of like knew more about it I was like That makes sense. So clean language is like a psychological kind of technique used in like counseling and stuff, but it's asking questions. without using any assumptions. And this can be used in any conversations that you go through. So the example that was given was if I said to you, like, how are you feeling today? And I went, I'm feeling like an octopus.

Like, I'm just feeling like an octopus. Instead of being like, oh, I know exactly what you mean, you're using your eight tentacles to spin eight plates. when actually that might not be what i'm meaning i might mean that i'm like feeling very flexible and adaptable and scooting across the ocean floor seamlessly you know but if you use the clean language which that was the example given and i resonate honestly i do i'm like an octopus um

No, so using the clean language is using questions to kind of probe more to get a better understanding of where that person's coming from. And I guess that I've been doing a lot of... work on perspective and being aware of different perspectives from different people, different situations and kind of crafting my response. kind of with that perspective and the clean language.

i found really lended well to that perspective because once you've got that perspective you're gonna react and respond in a lot more of an open and approachable way so clean language it's a thing an octopus. Lovely. That's what I took for an octopus.

Marty, what have you learned this week? Yeah, so mine wasn't a work revelation this week, it was a So I turned 40 this year and for my midlife crisis I bought a... amp modeler effects modeler for my bass guitar so i've never had these things and i was like i was just always straight standard you know um and this week i've learned a formula to make a fantastic synth bass sound

to take me back to the 80s, which is brilliant. So it's as simple as put it through an octave, a bit of fuzz, and a bit of chorus, and off you go. That's amazing. Do you want to send us a recording of that? We'll put it in the show. We can try. So if we're about to play some synth bass now, then Mari has achieved this. And if we don't, then... We'll try our past, Ross. So I learned a new word this week as well, which was pebbling. Anyone familiar with pebbling?

Pepling. You're looking both confused. So this is where penguins collect little stones and then they bring them back to their partners. And they do this for two reasons. So one is to build out a nest. And the second is that they're building out a relationship. So the act of giving a pebble has a social significance for the penguins helping them bond. And this term can also be applied to humans, except instead of giving stones, human partners send each other memes.

And my wife told me about this term, pointing out that basically every time I go into the bathroom, I send her a meme a couple of minutes later. And if that seems like too much information, well... We've got almost 400 episodes of the show and you should have come to expect this from me by now.

Isn't that lovely? I took the lovely practice of pebbling and made it grim and uncomfortable for everyone. You are welcome. To be fair, Ross, I can corroborate that because I think I heard that last week. Yeah, I think that's true. So it's not going to be the same if I just start going around collecting stones and giving them to people, right? We'd be thrilled, Lara. If you'd like to get it. Check out our website. that offer code for 15%. on individuals. cast 50.

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