GA 643 | Asking Better Questions with Kabrina Ashley

As the main leader, it's hard to say, yes, this person who's so good on my team, who's the star of the things that I'm giving them, who gets the work done, who comes in day in, day out, now all of a sudden they're stuck in that position. Because why would I as a leader take somebody out of a position where they're doing 2 or 3 people's jobs and then have to replace them?

Today I am excited to welcome Cabrina Ashley to the show. Now, um, today's episode's a little bit different than our, our typical sort of, you know, continuous improvement-focused topics. But as you'll hear, the things that we talk about are extremely relevant to what we're doing in leadership and continuous improvement. So, so Caprina is sort of an expert on change and then also really digs into the whole idea of neuroscience and why we human beings behave the way that we behave. And I am personally fascinated with this topic of neuroscience and the brain and how everything operates up there. So, but to begin with, we sort of just kind of, we jump into the conversation with talking a little bit about this whole idea of change. And there's been situations I'm sure you can relate to where you've sort of communicated something or some change that you want to happen. Everybody's sort of nodding their head and, "Yep, that sounds good." And then all of a sudden, doesn't happen, like what's going on there? Then we get into something that she calls the high performers paradox, which is a really interesting concept. And so we dig into that a little bit. And then my favorite part really was towards the end of the episode. And this is when we really get into sort of the neuroscience side of things. And particularly we begin it with talking about habits. And we spent a little bit of time talking about sort of like Charles Duhigg habit loop, but then really digging into again, Why do we do the things that we do? And then if we're doing something that's not positive, that's not a good habit, like what do we do to change that? And then finally, towards the end, we get into this whole idea of leaders running old code. And it's a really interesting topic that Caprina shines a lot of light on. So I think you're going to enjoy this one. I know I did. Show notes can be found over at gembapodcast.com. This is episode 643. Again, gembapodcast.com, look for episode 643. Okay, enough from me. Let's get to the show. Cabrina, welcome to the show. How are you?

Doing well. So glad to be here this morning.

Yeah. Where are you calling in from?

I'm in Nashville.

Nashville.

Yeah.

All right. That's a super cool part of the country. Have you been there a long time?

So I've been here for almost 3 years. Previously in Colorado, and definitely never a dull moment. There's always a, here's a show, or here's some random tickets that I got. So we're always seeing live music, so it definitely lives up to its name.

Wonderful, wonderful. Well, that's good. All right, well, hey, um, Cabrina, I know you know we like to begin our episodes with our guests sharing a quote, so what do you got?

Yeah, absolutely. So this is one that I've had on my desk for a really long time, and I think when we're talking about The things that we're talking about today with leadership, this Taylor Swift quote is one of my favorites because she says, "You're not someone else's opinion of you." And I think we spend so much time living in this what other people think of us that we miss a lot of the opportunities that come right in front of us because we're so concerned with how other people see us.

Yeah, 100%. 100%. Good stuff. Good stuff. All right. Well, hey, tell us a little bit about yourself, Cabrina. Tell us about your background and the line of work that you're in today.

Mm-hmm. Yeah. So, it has definitely been a journey of, "Oh, it's interesting that we did that full circle." And I say that quite often as things happen, but I actually started and wanted to be the first female and youngest CEO of Disney. So, I was working in the parks. I was working in Services for Guests with Disabilities, training cast members, being in corporate really early on in my career, not realizing how unique that was. And then once I had my first kiddos, I moved back from California to Colorado and got straight into tech. So this was before working from home was cool. And okay, it was one of those things where there was only a couple of options for you back then. It was working in tech, doing medical coding, or working in an MLM. And I was like, I don't want to do medical coding and I don't want to do an MLM. So tech it is. Had never coded a day in my life. Got hired by a tech company and they were like, 'You can learn this stuff. You've got the Disney background. We can figure out the rest of it.' And so that had carried me through in a lot of different ways. Learned how to code templates, brought things over, and then started having people ask me from little things that I would tell them about their marketing and the way that they were writing things, 'Do you do consulting?' And I was like, 'Oh, I never thought about doing that, but let's jump in and try it.' And I think that's how a lot of us get into our careers. We're like, 'We didn't even know this was an option.' And so started getting a bunch of clients, and then before I knew it, I had a coaching and marketing agency that I was running. And it was because a lot of people get burned in the marketing world, and so they find somebody they trust and they're like, oh my God, you did this for me, can you do this, this, this, and this? And you're like, yeah, I can do that, we can figure that out. And before I knew it, I had a team. And then COVID hit, and I was like, I had to really ask myself do I love doing this, or is this something that I just created my own 9 to 5 for? And when we reevaluated it, we were like, some of our team's leaving because of things going on in their own families during this time. And we really leaned back into the corporate, uh, coaching space because we saw such a need. And we see it with the loneliness epidemic right now. So here in Nashville, we're thinking about like, what is this suicide rate? And the fact that people are just stuck in themselves. Because if you think about it, where do people go when they're in the corporate space? They go to work and they come home and they probably sit in the car for 2 or 3 hours driving back and forth in traffic. And so there's not a whole lot of space for them to be together. And what I'm finding, the more that I work with people in that C-suite especially, is they're like, there's nobody to talk to. There's nobody who understands. I can't be vulnerable. I can't be like, these are the things that I'm struggling with, or here's the kinds of things that I'm thinking about for the business, because we've created this space within corporate where it's not okay to fail, it's not okay to innovate. We really want those things, but we don't know how to make it to where people can do that without punishing them in the process.

Yeah, the whole idea of being vulnerable, you know, is really difficult, right? Especially like you said, in the corporate world, even at home it can be, right? But, uh, but yeah, for sure, um, really, really challenging. That's, that's, um, a very interesting niche that you found, so well done.

Yeah, thank you. It's been one of those ones where you're like, oh, I know enough about this, and then you just keep reading and keep learning. Because with the kind of work that I do in science, you It's different every day. It's really one of the last frontiers is how do we function? How does the brain work? And we don't know all the answers yet. Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm. Well, okay. I'm fascinated. As we were talking before we hit record, I am fascinated with the whole idea of, of the brain and neuroscience and just really the intersection of, um, with business, but also just life in general, right? Because we're, you know, um, we live a, we spend a lot of time in our lives outside of work. Sometimes I think we can get fixated on work, but boy, there's a lot going on outside with families and personal lives and all the rest of it. So really, really fascinated with this topic. But maybe to kind of jump into my first question, I want to— we'll keep it sort of in the corporate world and in the work world for right now. But talk to me a little bit about change and thinking about imagining a situation to where we've got a leader and they're rolling out change. Everybody nods, everybody's agreeing, everybody's shaking their heads and everything's good. And but I don't— maybe something doesn't work and it's for whatever reason things aren't clicking. Like what's going on in those situations to where the leader thought things were working, and thought things were understood, but maybe they weren't.

Yeah, absolutely. So there are a couple things that are happening here. There's inertia, because whether people are moving or not, most people that I talk to about inertia are like, inertia is when people are standing still and then we impose change on them. But most of the time, especially in the work world, we're having people that are moving in one direction and now we're asking them to move in a different direction, and it's very difficult for people to do that. So one, we're having the inertia piece. Two, we're also having the change and what did I actually hear you say? So for anybody who's listening who has kids, we know that we'll say one thing and then they'll go do another and you're like, that— where did you get that? Where did that come from? And adults are the same way. They're going to hear the parts that make sense to them. Or we're seeing a lot of this piece within communication between different generations. So if I say something as a boomer to a millennial or a Gen Z, what are they taking out of that? Because the words mean different things. So making sure that we're coming to a, this is what this means, do you understand? And really doing active listening in this so that when there's little things that are not exactly right, it's like saying and versus but in a sentence. It doesn't seem like a big deal in that moment. But then when we get into 2 or 3 days down the road or a week down the road, now that this change is in place, now we start to see where those tiny little bit of fractures where you're like, oh, it's fine, it's close enough, that we start to see those diverge. And we go, oh, that's where things went wrong. But most people, most leaders don't take enough time to go, that was because I said it a certain way, or they didn't understand those words in the way that I needed them to. And now we're way down the path. And instead of saying, how can I do Do this better the next time, we assert blame onto whoever the person was who ended up taking up the instructions to make the change happen.

Yeah. The next direction I want to go is something that I know you call the high performers paradox. And this is when perhaps we've got people in the organization that whatever, we're leaning on them the most, we're asking the most of them, but sometimes, unfortunately, they're the ones that are quietly disengaging. And so, I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit about this, like, what is that? What is that? And why is it happening? And really, most importantly, what can we be doing differently to ensure that doesn't happen?

Well, when you're the main leader on a team, being very cognizant of the people that you keep asking to do more, because those people at first are going to take on those responsibilities because If anybody's been to business school, one of the first things they teach you is raise your hand for everything, say yes for everything, take on as much as you can because that shows how capable you are. And logically that makes sense until all of a sudden you keep getting asked to do another thing, you keep getting asked to do another thing, and then Bob, Larry, and Sue, who don't have as much training as you do, don't have as much experience, haven't been in the business as long, are getting promoted, and you're going, Well, what's wrong with me? Why am I not the one who's getting into those positions? And then you realize that as the main leader, it's hard to say, yes, this person who's so good on my team, who's the star of the things that I'm giving them, who gets the work done, who comes in day in, day out. Now all of a sudden they're stuck in that position because why would I as a leader take somebody out of a position where they're doing 2 or 3 people's jobs? And then have to replace them and then train that next set of people up. And it's nothing that anybody's doing on purpose. Like, there's not people maliciously sitting in corporate going, "Well, this person's so good, we're just going to keep putting more stuff on them and we're never going to promote them." It really is that slow fade that happens and people all of a sudden wake up because they've started to disengage because of the fact that they keep seeing these patterns happen over and over again. I do more work, I don't get the recognition, and then somebody else who does less work than me gets promoted. And so then I do more work to try and prove myself more, and then I don't get recognized and I don't get promoted. And that becomes this cyclical cycle for those people. And so there's something called the S-curve that we want to keep people in the middle of a giant S. If you imagine a giant S on the screen, then we want to keep people in the middle. And it's not always money is the thing that people want. They want recognition. They want to be able to be known for what they do. They want to be able to go into depth on their knowledge. And when leaders are not looking for those things, we miss the opportunity to put people into positions where they could make the business flourish beyond what we've even considered, because we're comfortable with them in the position that they are now because they're fulfilling a need, but they're fulfilling it in a way that makes it to where they're going to be the first people to go.

Mm-hmm. Hey, what is your thoughts on, like, personality types as it relates to working with our colleagues or, you know, other leaders or whatnot? Like, for example, like, I'm thinking about, like, I'm a big words of affirmation guy. I love it when you tell me I did a great job or whatever. But my wife is more like, melancholic or whatever, and she's— she could care less, you know, if you— but you do an act of service for her and she's all about it, you know what I mean? So like, is that— what are your thoughts on that as it relates to sort of like knowing your— knowing your audience, if you will, knowing your people, knowing your team, your colleagues? What are your thoughts on that?

I think it's good to understand those things, but I think that a lot of people lean too far into them. I love Myers-Briggs, I love the Enneagram, I love talking about these different kinds of things. But I also think that there's a lot of opportunity for us to ebb and flow between them, especially as we change and different things happen in life. And I think we saw this in a big way during COVID because we went from in office to suddenly out of office to then everybody trickled back into office. And so you see how people's personalities have changed, how their preferences have changed, how things that they really did well the first time in office changed differently when they came back to office. And so giving people the opportunity to go, this is where I see you right now. And it's very much that idea of people within their own place, like where you grew up, people don't want to look at the things that you've developed over time. And so if we get too stuck into those ideas of this is who a person is, this is who they like, because even when we talk about like words of affirmation, When I was younger, words of affirmation were something that I absolutely loved. I loved it when people told me I did a good job. As I got older, those were things that were not as important to me in that season. And so understanding your team, especially when you're with a team that's grown together over a long period of time, multiple years, sometimes decades, it's important to know that people change and they flow. Cuz there's a lot of leadership training out there that's very detrimental. Of here's a leader, you separate people into their categories, and that's how you treat them. But that takes into no account neuroplasticity, of the fact that people change, and there isn't very much that plastic— here's who I am now today, but here's all the learnings that I've taken, and here's who I am now. We don't live in the same world that we used to of old dog, new tricks. It's hard to teach people that are older because people can learn things at any pace that they choose to learn them at. It might take a little bit longer because we have kids and other responsibilities and things to do as adults than when we're children, but there is that people change over time. So in short, it's good to know, but also always ask questions, always be the person who's pushing back a little bit of, I know this is who you say that you are, But what other things can we do? What's the next step for you? I love to ask my people, where do you see yourself in 6 months from now? Like, let's not talk a year out. Let's talk 3 to 6 months out. What do you want to do with your life? What do you— where do you want to see yourself? Because we get so stuck in this finite, well, this is who I am, this is how I grew up, these are the things that I experience. And a lot of those things are childhood traumas. Things that we were told that we are. And it goes back to the quote that we talked about, it's other people's opinion of you. Because when you're a kid, you say, I can do anything, I can be Superman, I can fly. And then all of a sudden we get into corporate, we get into our jobs, we get into adulthood, and we lose all of that. There's a study that was done where kindergartners are actually— it was 98% considered genius level. And every year that they're in school, that percentage of kids that are considered genius goes down. And it's not because people are getting dumber as they get older. It's because they're dumbing themselves down in the process because of the people around them and not saying, hey, I'm going to do this anyways.

So how do we prevent that? Like, that's scary, right? Thinking about our children. I mean, I have children. You have children. You know, we want them to flourish or whatever. So is it like bad parenting, or like, what's going on here? The society in general is, is not behaving correctly. Like, if you had a magic wand and you could change the world, what would you do?

I would make people ask more questions. I think we all go into this with really good intentions. Like, you don't say to your kid, you can't be a rock star, because you want to hurt them. You say that because you know how difficult that is. And you've watched other people around you go through those things of being the starving artist and all of those pieces. But who are we to tell somebody that they can't do something? Who am I?

It's so wild that you just said that. So, I mentioned this on the podcast before, but you may not know, but my son, Ryan, he's a musician. And so, he basically started self-taught and started playing guitar and singing and grabbed his iPhone and made a TikTok video. A few years ago. And fast forward today, he signed with a record label, um, and you can look, it goes by Ryan Price, um, middle, his middle name's Price, so it rolls off the tongue better than Pereira apparently. So his music name is Ryan Price. And, uh, you know, he's, he, he just moved to, uh, to Austin and to be closer to that music scene and all the rest of it. And my wife and I, we, we didn't ever I wouldn't say discourage him from it, although to your point, we were kind of like, well, that's going to be a tough road. You know, we did it. I mean, I'm not— I'm just— I'll admit it, you know, but I didn't— I don't think that we tried to squash his dream, but it was kind of like, hey, stay in school. And, you know, like, he didn't go the college route like his siblings and all the rest of it, you know. And but he's, you know, he's doing great, right? But It's so interesting that you said that because it is so easy to worry, you know, about your kids. And, you know, I went to college and I got the business and all the rest of it. So be like me, you know, kind of thing. Well, no, he's going to be like Ryan, right? But boy, it's scary and it's difficult to do that, especially with your children, right?

Yeah. Well, when my kids were really little, I had a mentor and he was just kind of talking off the cuff. And he said something that hit me of, he started in YouTube when YouTube was very, very new, doing video editing for like real estate agents and things like that. And he was like, I could never answer the question when I was a kid what I wanted to be when I grew up. And I realized later on in life that because it was because of the fact that what I wanted to be when I grew up didn't exist when I was a kid.

Mm-hmm.

And you look at where the world is, where AI is, everybody's freaking out about technology. But there's jobs that we don't even know are going to exist in the next 6 months, 2 years, 5 years from now that our kids could easily be doing. And so if I'm the one who's like, yeah, don't go do that, don't do this, then I'm holding my kids back. I'm holding people that I'm working with back. I'm holding people that I'm leading back from being something that could be the next Steve Jobs, that could be the next physicist, the next whatever it is.

Yep. Yep. Good stuff. Good stuff. All right. Let's get back into the brain. So we've been dancing around all over the place, but I want to talk about— next question is really about, well, many folks listening right now are— we live in this continuous improvement world. And so when we think about continuous improvement, a lot of it depends on habit change. And it's a topic that we've talked a lot about on this podcast over the years. But what I want to do, especially with your specialty and your expertise, talk a little bit about what's going on inside of our brain as it looks when we're, I don't know, we're learning something or some new skill or some new standard is being developed. But unfortunately, sometimes these improvements or whatever that might be, they don't always stick, right? So like what's going on in this whole process and what are we doing sometimes wrong.

Yeah, so a lot of times this starts with how do I view learning. And having trained in corporate for many, many years, most people come into a training and they go, I just have to get this checked off my list. There is no I'm going to retain this. It's okay, I have to go to this for 4 hours today, and then let me think about all the things that I'm doing for the rest of the week, all the things that I have to do in the last 4 hours of the day, how this is is going to make it to where I have overtime. So we've already lost the people. So when I have some clients that I still do speaker coaching with, and there's two voices in our heads— there's the voice that I'm hearing right now, and then there's the voice that people have in the back of their mind while you're talking. So this could be, let me think about the grocery list that I have to do. I might be driving to work while I'm listening to this, and now I need to make a left turn versus a right turn because there's a lane closed. And so there's always this extra conversation happening. And when we understand that as leaders, as trainers, as people trying to get information into a brain, now I know that I need to be one more entertaining. So edutainment is one of my most favorite words that has come out in the last several years because people want to be entertained. The more that we make people bored, the more they're not going to listen to us because they already have that voice that's drowning out anything that we're saying. And so there's studies that have been done all over the place where it's about 15 minutes. We need to make something interesting again, tell a joke, say something that's interesting, put, put an image on the screen. We have to have some kind of surprise and delight within our training. And most people in learning and development is, can I just get this done? And can people finish this? That's really the line that all of corporate wants to know. Is, is the training done? Is it in a portal that somebody can go through? And do they finish it? And if your job as somebody in a corporation is to go through a training and click all the buttons, what are you going to do? You're going to just click whatever button, you're going to listen just enough to get by, and you're going to say, okay, I finished it. So that's one of the biggest pieces of retention that I see with how we're doing things now. So let's say that you've upped it one module and there's an in-person field or there's small groups. Now we need to actually ask the question of, did people retain what we said? And did they retain the things that we actually said, like we talked about earlier? Is the same message coming across? Because I was listening to your last podcast with George of how there was the quote that he had mentioned that somebody in his corporation was like, oh, this was from a medical doctor. And this is the reason. And so it wasn't because he needed to tone down, it was because of the fact that of something completely different, but he heard it one way and the meaning wasn't there. And so that's another reason that we don't retain, because what if it doesn't fit with our worldview, with the things that we think, or it makes us to where there's something that makes it feel like we're going to lose our job? We see this a lot with the AI pieces. There's companies that really genuinely want to teach their people and upskill their people with AI, But we've seen other things like with Meta where they're like, we're going to train these people using you. We're going to train the AI and then we're going to let you go. That everybody across the board is going, I don't want to learn AI because that's scary. And if I learn this, now I'm going to lose my job. But the juxtaposition of that, if you don't learn it, you're also going to lose your job. So there isn't a win-win here, but if the more that we try and upskill ourselves, That means that we have more opportunity the next place we go, whether that job at the moment lets us go or not, because there's no way for us to say what the intentions are at every corporation at any given moment.

Yeah. Something that I've heard you talk about is you've mentioned about leaders running old code, kind of like computer code. What is that? What does that mean? And I assume that it's not a positive thing.

Yeah. So if you think about how I like to explain this to people is if you've ever had a digital camera, you have the card that goes into it and I can delete all of the pictures off of that card, but those pictures are still there in almost a phantom way until I write over them. Your brain works the exact same way. So let's say that you've done the habit. You're eating healthy, you're going to the gym, all of these things. But if we're not overriding that with the right messages— so let's say that I've always thought that I'm not good enough, uh, I'll never be enough, I'll never be skinny enough. This is one that we see a lot with everybody across the board, is there's some kind of thing that they don't feel good enough about themselves. Maybe it's, I'm not gonna ever be a leader, nobody's ever gonna recognize me for the thoughts and feelings that I have. And so we keep— even when we're in that space where everything looks good and we're doing the right things on the outside, that message on the inside is still saying the same thing. So we've got those phantom photos over and over and over again because I haven't rewritten over them. So now we have to start doing things— as soft as it sounds, positive self-talk will take you farther than any of these other things that we've talked about, or that The Space in general of improvement talks about, because of the fact that if I'm telling myself one thing and doing another thing, we have that cognitive dissonance, and the brain will always win because it's over and over and over and over again every day subconsciously telling you that you're not good enough, you're never going to make it, you're never going to be skinny enough, you're never going to be the person who is in a leadership position. People are never gonna respect you. And now we have to go backwards and not just do positive self-talk, but now we also have to go, where the heck did that come from? Who said that to me? Who was that figure before I turned 25 and my brain was completely solidified? What, who was that person who told me that? Was it a parent? Was it a teacher? And figuring out who that person was and being able to go, okay, that was not my voice. And so one of the things that I challenge people with is thinking about, is that you saying that to you, or is it somebody else's voice in your head? Because most of the time people will tell me, no, it doesn't sound like me, it doesn't sound like that voice that I say in my head when I'm talking to myself, it's somebody else outside of me. And so figuring out who that is, because what happens is that we have synapses, and so normally there's a gap in between. And so the more that that thought and feeling— so there's a thought that I'm not good enough, what feeling does that come up with for me? Those braid together in our brain, and the more that it happens over and over again, now that synapses becomes glued together, which makes it harder to get rid of. That's why people go back to bad habits. It's not because they don't have the willpower or they're not good enough or because they just can't do it. It's because it's already programmed and we're running that old code over and over again. And so that determination can only last so long before we burn out and get exhausted. So now we have to do that positive self-talk to break those and then see more and more of those good self-talk come in. And so if you can imagine a— you've walked in the same grass space for the last 2 years, but you want to grow that grass back. It's going to take time and effort to grow that grass back. And now we have to make a whole nother route in the grass to put it in a different spot. And that's really what we're doing from a structural level in the brain.

What are your thoughts on the work of like— was it The Power of Habit? Charles Duhigg. Have you— are you familiar with his work at all?

I haven't actually read his book.

Yeah. So it's an interesting book. And so his, his whole thoughts on on sort of habits and habit changes, sort of having this whole idea of there's a cue, there's a routine. So a cue, there's triggers you to do that thing, whatever it is. Then there's a routine and then there's some sort of reward, right? And then there's this loop, right? And these can be good, you know, routines, positive for ourselves. But it could also, to your point, be bad or negative to ourselves. You know, an alcoholic, for example, you know, that could be a cue. I see something and you do the drinking and then, well, the reward is, I guess, how you feel or whatever, right? So, like, what are your thoughts on that as far as when it— even from a professional perspective, thinking about the things that we do on a day-to-day basis that might keep us thriving or stuck in, in the mud.

Yeah, so this actually hinges on the reward piece, because when we're trying to start new habits, it's— I wrote something about this yesterday— it's if you go to the gym, most people don't want to just go to the gym. It's not something that they crave. They go to the gym because they want to have the feeling afterwards. And what is the reward for that? And most of the time when we're doing work We're doing something in order to get to something that's somewhere out in the distance. Maybe I'll get the promotion, maybe I'll do X, Y, and Z, and we don't actually reward ourselves in the moment. So those things don't stick very long because we need that little dopamine hit of, oh, okay, maybe it's— for some people, like when you're teaching a kid to potty train, you give them an M&M, for example, or a tiny little car every time that they go to the bathroom. While they're potty training. We don't really change that much between the things that work when we're kids and the things that we— that work when we're adults. And so thinking about how do people function as humans and going, how can I reward myself in this moment? Maybe it's the high-fiving myself at my desk. These don't have to be difficult things. They can be that high-five at your desk, that I'm going to take a 5-minute walk, I'm going to walk away from my desk and grab a cup of coffee. That I normally don't get. And so finding 100 to 200 different ways that you can reward yourself— and some people that I work with, sometimes it's like, hey, I'm gonna set a timer for 5 minutes and I'm gonna scroll on TikTok, and that's my reward for getting this really hard email that I wanted to get out done. And so you're looking forward to something that's small consistently, and then those build on each other, which makes it easier to have that peace of mind of I'm getting somewhere. So to answer your question, yes, that's a very good way to think about it, of here's the trigger of I see something, I do the pattern, and then I reward myself, is really just how human nature works. Because if you think about it, like the drinking for example, I have the trigger, I go through the pattern, and then I get to escape whatever I'm trying to escape, and that's the feeling that I'm looking for. And we try and skip to the bad parts of bad habits of, well, you know that this is going to happen, but they also know that that really good feeling is going to happen. So what if we could have that same exact feeling when it comes to the good things that we're doing, like sending out the hard email or applying for the jobs that seem a little bit out of scope?

Yeah, good stuff. Oh, wow. What a conversation. I'm really fascinated with this whole idea of our brains and our behavior and and, uh, what makes this human being tick. It's a never-ending journey, right, to try to understand it all. So, well, hey, I really appreciate you coming on to the show. I mean, I don't— maybe to wrap things up, do you have any sort of like final words of wisdom or parting advice that you want to leave with the listeners?

Yeah, absolutely. So it— when it comes down to self-improvement, looking at yourself as I'm not broken, I'm just asking better questions, because the quality of your life is determined by the quality of questions that you ask. So how can I ask a better question, just one basic better question today, that's going to get me a better result tomorrow? And looking for that 1% better.

I love it, love it. If people wanted to connect with you, uh, Cabrina, what's the best way?

Yeah, absolutely. So if connecting with me, my website kabrinaashley.com is the best place you can get on a call with me or find all of the links for our resources. And then I hang out over on LinkedIn and I answer all of those myself. So if you have specific things, that's the best place.

Perfect. And we'll link everything up in the show notes. Everybody kind of scroll down and be sure to connect with Kabrina. So hey, thanks again for coming on. This has been a lot of fun.

Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for having me.

All right, take care. Thanks for joining us today. We know the path to continuous improvement can be challenging to walk alone. That's why Gemba Academy exists, not just to provide training, but to be your partner in problem solving. Whether you're just taking your first steps or leading a global transformation, our goal is to help you bridge the gap between knowing and doing. Beyond our library of Lean and Six Sigma resources, We're here to coach and guide you through your journey, whether that's through personalized support or joining us for a live training to get that immersive hands-on experience. To learn more, go to gembaacademy.com.