Failure is Not Optional, with Cheryl Johnson of RWL Tech

Hello and welcome to Shedding the Bitch Radio, where you can discuss, debate, and get advice on how to discover and shed the bitches of fear, insecurity, self-doubt, and negative mindsets so you can realize your dreams and life purpose and create and accelerate the riches you want in life. Join us here live every Tuesday at noon Eastern and dialogue with us at 818-572-2910. You can also chat with us at blogtalkradio.com/sheddingthebitch or share your stories on our website at sheddingthebitch.com. Whatever Whatever the bitch is that's holding you back from living your life to the fullest, it's not worth giving up the riches in life that you deserve. So call in now and let Bernadette Boas know what's holding you back.

818-572-2910. Good day, good day, good day everyone and welcome to Shedding the Bitch Radio. We have such a great conversation today. Strap up your boots, get your pen and paper, and just dig in because we're gonna be talking failure and ambition and that they're not dirty words. They're actually awesome words that we all need to be embracing. But before we get into all that, just a few announcements. We've had some great episodes that you need to check out on sheddingthebitch.com, on blogtalkradio.com, Apple Podcasts, anywhere you get your podcasts. Or you can go to our YouTube channel, which is Bernadette Boas Shed the BTV. All right, now our last episode was our Ask Me Anything. It's the first Tuesday of every month where I take your questions, stories, and challenges and provide you some tips and advice. 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Debbie Snelling and her crowd is just awesome when it comes to full-service financial and tax services for small to corporate-sized clients all around the country, not just in Georgia. And you can check her out at ngtaxsolutions.com. All right, again, we can't do it without our sponsors and without all of you, so thank you for being here. All right, today is all about Failure is not optional, people. It is required. So we're going to talk about how you can— how people idolize and promote people who have experienced success in their life. Rarely do we focus on the oftentimes painful and discouraging process called failure that it takes to achieve that success. Meaningful and long-term success is built on a foundation of trying experiences that build resilience and hone the characteristics that we find admirable in successful people, such as creativity, team building, effective communication, and problem solving. Now, I want you all to be listening for a few things. I want you to be listening for how to stimulate creativity in the workplace, to get people out of their head and creating. Also, develop effective teams at work. By recognizing that failure is not optional, it's a must. You want to listen for how you can be honing meaningful communications and, and learn how to problem solve effectively, as well as develop that resilience that it takes to overcome any type of failure so you succeed. And it's a must. You must, must, must, must. Now our guest, smiling pretty there, is Cheryl Johnson of RWL Tec, who has 25 years experience in coaching, learning development, and workplace training performance. With her pioneering attitude, Cheryl has made strong contributions in the area of learning with an emphasis on behavioral change. Cheryl has been recognized as a leader in the architecture and design of interactive multimedia learning systems and strategies. She is also published by well-known educational psychologist Michael Allen in his 2012 eLearning Annual. Cheryl has dedicated her life to developing learning solutions that drive performance at work and in one's personal life. And I want to end with the fact that she is an author of The Ambition Quotient: The Missing Attribute in Your Employees. And you can find that on Amazon. Check it out.. It is something that you want to use for yourself, but you're going to also want to use for your teams and everyone else in the workplace. How are you, Cheryl?

I'm great. I'm excited to be here.

I'm excited to talk to you. There's actually a lot to unwrap here, but I do want to kind of level set everyone, including Cheryl, that as we get into a conversation here on the Shedding the Bitch Show, we want to ground you in a rich question that's relevant to the subject we're talking about. So then that way, even though you may not think this is a topic that is specific to you, if you consider this rich question, you just might pick up things that you might not have picked up previously without really kind of thinking through a rich question. So your rich question for today to be considering is, how do you respond to failure? Consider that. How do you respond to failure? Because as Cheryl says, it's not an option. If you want to succeed, you need to look at failure as a good thing, not a bad thing. Um, wouldn't you agree, Cheryl?

Oh, definitely. I've had lots of experience with it too, so I can, you know, firsthand experience.

Absolutely, absolutely. And that's what we're here to talk about, so everybody get ready. Because what I first want to understand though is, let's back up a little bit and tell us a little bit about Cheryl, just so we can kind of get acquainted with you first before we dive into this, this topic about failure.

Yes, I'm in it by trade. I'm an instructional designer. I started off just writing training programs many, many years ago. I guess My very first experience writing training formally was probably what I consider to be one of the biggest failures. It was in, um, it came out of a need that wasn't working very well at the time.

Sweet.

And so I, um, that's kind of where I started. And then I formally went back to school and, you know, paid all that big money to get the little piece of paper. That basically said I could do what I had already been doing for the last 10 to 15 years and said, "Okay, you know, you're official now. You can put your little stamp." Everybody can put their little stamp of approval and say, "We can work with you now because you have that little piece of paper." Right, right.

But doesn't it happen that way that something in your life you find to be broken or unsatisfied or just a gap or a hole and you, you know, and you're like, "Wait a minute." If someone else hasn't solved this or taken care of this, I have to do it. Interesting how the world works, isn't it? So you went on to then, once you had that piece of paper, you went on to be the— I love that— be the architecture and designer of interactive multimedia learning systems. Tell us a little bit about that.

How I got into it or what I, what I actually do?

What you actually do around that.

What I do is we, I help organizations create blueprints, you know, as we are. You would never build a house without having a blueprint, right? And you hire an architect to do that, right? I, I can't even tell you, I've been doing this so long, and I would say at least 98% of the time people come in to me and they say, I I need a 30-minute training on— it's got to be online— on ethics. And I go, okay, what made you decide that you needed a training on ethics? Well, compliance. We have to check the box. We have to say that we do this. Okay, how did you decide you wanted to be online? I mean, this before COVID mind you, right?

Right.

And they're like, well, because That's the easiest way to do it. I'm like, okay, how did you decide you wanted it to be 30 minutes long? Well, that's all the content we have is for 30 minutes. I'm like, okay, let's step back from that and let's talk about— and I find this really interesting. I was working for a membership organization of electrical cooperatives. And they had a similar issue. Most of the time when people come to me and talk about ethics or harassment in the workplace, those kind of things, it's almost always, let's check the box. We need it for legal purposes to make sure that, you know, if anything happens, we've got our tails covered here.

Sadly, yep.

But these people were actually experiencing issues in these areas. And so I was like, you know, rather than just kind of go through a couple of scenarios and have people answer a few questions and say, oh good, we conceptually, we get the idea. I was like, I think we really need to dig into this a little bit deeper and find out exactly where this problem is coming from. Because the people who are actually engaging in what some people considered harassment didn't see it that way. They saw it as, being friendly, as being, you know, open. And— but the other people weren't perceiving it that way. So this really wasn't so much of a harassment problem as it was a communication problem. And they just simply needed to find a different way to communicate their— what they thought were compliments.

Right, right.

And so that's why I really stress to organizations, let's dig in and find out what's really driving the need for this training or, you know, that you want done. And if it's just to check the box, there's plenty of off-the-shelf compliance, you know, we don't really need to go to all the trouble and expense of doing that. But if you really are experiencing a problem, let's talk about that and let's find out exactly what's driving it and, you know, get to the root cause analysis kind of thing. And when I work with organizations on that level, then they step back and go, okay, That makes more sense. So that's why it's really important to, just kind of back to the analogy of building a house. If you don't really care what kind of house you have, there's a ton of off-the-shelf blueprints you can get. Just go grab one and have somebody build it. But if you really want a custom house that's gonna fit your needs, then let's talk about that.

Right, and let's design it. You know, customize it, tailor it to your particular need, and especially to make it user-friendly and accepted.

Yes.

Yeah, because user adoption, I would think, is a big key, and if you can get it based on what it is that they need, they'll adopt it easier than if you didn't include them in the process.

Yeah, and once again, you know, going back to, you know, my experience is that most of the time they say they care whether people adopt it, but they don't. They simply want to get it out there, right? And then they wonder why their training budget is not, you know, it's not generating any meaningful change in their organization. And it's just, it's a drain and it gets a bad name.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Wow. And define multimedia for us. Like when you say multimedia learning systems and strategies. You're looking at, you know, combining different strategies?

Oh, that can be so many different things. We think of multimedia, we typically think of online kind of learning, which it can be. But we can do simple, you know, depending on what your needs are, we can do simple PowerPoint presentations and make them a little more interactive with a couple bells and whistles. Or we can take it to a new level and we can do some drag-and-drop type activities, that kind of thing. Those are all still really basic level. But then we can start getting into more higher level simulations, which are much more fun and much more interesting and much more engaging. And it's interesting, talking about failure, bringing this back to failure. Yeah. What we've tried to do, and it is a little more expensive and a little more challenging, is simulate what happens in the gaming world. For someone to succeed in most, you know, especially first-person shooter type video games, you have to fail. You have to. I mean, that's all part of the process.

Right.

And you're constantly out seeking all of these different tokens or whatever. You know, I'm not a real big video game person myself, but you gather all this information to help you solve this problem to move through and, you know, you move up a little bit, then you move down a little bit, you know, and then you move up a little bit and then you learn a few things and you have to step back a little bit. But the whole concept of video games, which is, I'm sure we all agree, is extremely popular these days. It's all based on failure.

Right.

Success in that world is based on failure.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And so we try to do that. We try to mimic that a little bit in, you know, simulations and things. And those simulations can be in-person ones that we do in class, or they can be online simulations. So simulations, gaming, you know, just simply rewarding people for doing certain things, those type of things all tend to fall under the umbrella of multimedia learning.

Yeah.

OK, good. Because I was— and I'm glad you— Segued into how it relates to failure because that's what I was thinking. I'm sitting here processing. I'm thinking, okay, learning systems and failure. Um, how do the two mesh? But let's go, let's go to the human factor here. Why do people have such a difficult time with failure?

Because it hurts and nobody wants to hurt. And, um, Going back to what you just said, you know, how does learning systems, how does this really tie into training and learning? We live in a world where we expect to go to training to learn all the right answers so that we don't fail. And our boss will send us to some kind of training so that we can learn all of these wonderful things to minimize the impact of risk-taking and failure when you come back into the organization because it costs money.

Yeah.

Organizations, it doesn't just hurt emotionally, it hurts your bottom line.

Right.

And so those are the reasons why bosses don't want you to fail. And personally, the reason you don't want to fail is because it simply hurts. And probably one of the best examples I share in my book and almost all the time is when I very first got started. I started— my husband, my first husband was blind. And so he used assistive technology to have the computer read to him. Okay. There was some new technology out there where for people who have mobility impairments where you can talk to the computer and, you know, we see this all the time nowadays. This was like in 1990. It was pretty new. You talk to the computer and it responds. You tell the computer, you dictate, and it will type for you, or you can tell it, you know, mouse right, mouse left, whatever, you know, that kind of stuff, right? Right. So my husband, he got really good at, you know, the screen reading technology where the computer talks to you, but he wanted me to get into the other side of it so that we could, you know, have both of these and start a business working with people who had disabilities. Well, we didn't have a lot of money, but we managed to scrape together $10,000. I remember it was roughly $10,000 plus all of our travel costs. We were living in Wyoming at the time and we went back to Boston. Big training that they were doing so we could learn to do everything right, you know, kind of thing. And it was just, it was probably one of the most challenging experience, one of plenty of them, but one of the most challenging experiences I've had in my life. It was wintertime, the flights were delayed, it was a nightmare. We got there at like 4 in the morning, the class started at 7. I don't function well with no sleep. I mean, some people can do it, I— that's not me, right? So I've had not even 3 hours of sleep. I mean, we had 3 hours of taking not even a nap. And I walked into class, sat down, and everybody got up and, you know, they were doing their exercises and things. I mean, on their computers and it was working, but my, for whatever reason, my computer wasn't working. And so they brought in some tech support to help me and they're still moving forward with the class while I'm over here trying to figure out what's going on with my computer. And this class was a week long. And I am not exaggerating when I say every single day I had issues with my computer. And they moved me to several different computers, you know. So, you know, by the time I walked away from this class, I just went home. I was frustrated. I was angry. It was like I spent all this money. How stupid could I be? This was ridiculous. Everybody else got what they needed from this class. I got nothing from it. I remember I took my little laptop, and laptops were new back then, so they were a lot more expensive than, you know, regular desktops, and my manuals, and I just threw them in the closet, and I was angry, and I was just like, ugh, why did I— this was one of the biggest mistakes I've ever made in my life. Why in the world did I do this? But I'm a pretty— even at that point, I could tell you stories even prior to that, I'm a pretty resilient person, and after a couple weeks, I opened the door to the closet, pulled the laptop out, got the manuals out, and I was like, wow, I'll bet you I learned 10 times more than other people in that class. Because while I was working on the computer, I was learning how to fix the computer. And back then, the hardware and the software weren't real compatible, and So when we would go out and train people, we spent a lot of time troubleshooting technical issues, getting things to work. That was a big part of what we did. And had I not have had all that experience— and this was in the days before cell phones and all that, and email, and I mean, email was just kind of new. But I lived in Wyoming. I would go train people out in the middle of nowhere.

Wow.

All I had access to was a phone line, and I had to pray that somebody was going to answer, you know, the back east, you know, the time zone change, right? And it— I had the manual that taught me how to talk to the computer, you know, so that it would recognize me and listen to me. But I had this other part of me too that knew all about this technical stuff that I had no interest in learning, really. But that's what made our business so much more successful than other businesses was that we weren't just training people how to use the technology, we could actually troubleshoot.

Yeah, fix it.

And that's what I tell people all the time is when we train people, we spend so much time making sure that everything works right in the training environment so that when they walk away, you know, they have step A, B, C, D that work. But it doesn't work that way.

Right. But at the same time, you're—

That way in real life.

Yeah, absolutely. And you're walking away with finding the blessing in the failure or in what you perceive to be, you know, a failure, a struggle, a challenge, an obstacle. And yet you found that nugget to say, well, wait a minute, there's something to take from this. Excuse me. There's something to take from this and not just throw it away and discard it and not appreciate it.

That's awesome.

That is awesome. So would you say, um, especially, you know, in the crazy times that we have right now going on, what would you say is turnover, morale, those kind of things? Are they issues? How great of an issue are they in organizations these days?

My own personal experience from this, and I've worked as an independent contractor for a long time, so I've worked for tons. I mean, when I say hundreds, I mean hundreds of different organizations— small, big, government, non-government, you name it. And it just happened COVID hit when I've been working for the University of California. I was out there on a contract, and they were very, very much into— I mean, I lived in Virginia, and I went clear to California because they wanted me on-site. Oh. And I was, I was there for over a year.

Oh wow.

Yeah, and I was really, I was like, the work we do doesn't really need to be— I mean, I live in Virginia, come on, let me go back. I work from home, I work remote all the time. They're like, no, no, no, no, no, we want you here. And I'm like, whatever, you're paying me, so whatever. And it was interesting because that organization, even though things could be remote, every job that was done could easily be done in a remote environment, there was something about that, the personality of that group. Once we went remote because they had to, they really struggled. It was really difficult for them because they're just the kind of people that would rather get up, walk next to the cubicle next to them and ask a question, right, and get on instant messenger and just say, I'm used to instant message, just like doo doo doo doo doo, you know, instant message back and But they, they just don't like that. That's just something they don't like. And so they really struggled. I think organizations that were used to remote work are doing okay.

Yeah, sure, sure.

Organizations that, you know, I was amazed at Silicon Valley. It was like, you guys haven't caught on to the whole remote work idea? Because as soon as this came out, they were all like, oh wow, this is so cool. We don't have to live in these expensive expensive places in Silicon Valley, we can go live in Montana, you know?

Right, right.

But yet they still don't know how to create that cohesive team in a remote environment. So in that aspect, I believe a lot of organizations are struggling. The other area where I see, and it really makes me sad, I still manage to, you know, drive around and be around, you know, the country a lot, even though through COVID, and it just breaks my heart to see closed signs everywhere. I mean, I— right now it's heartbreaking, and I'm just like, oh my gosh. But so many organizations were able to adapt.

Yeah.

And come up with new ways of doing things.

Oh sure, absolutely.

The other day I saw, you know, you go to the malls, and I'm not a big shopper, but you know, I just see these malls shuttered, you know. But Amazon has a new partnership they're building with JCPenney and Sears, and they're going to use their facilities as warehouses and their products, you know. So it's not just the space. And I'm like, I'm so glad to see people being creative and innovative and coming up with ideas, but it all came about because of quote, failure, right?

Right.

Because of COVID they had to shutter their businesses and close their doors. That's failure. That hurts.

Yeah. Yeah.

You know, but some people are surviving and, or, and some people are just going, hey, it's time for me to close shop and move on. And that's okay too. That's not a bad thing.

No. Well, that's what, that's what I was going to get to when it comes to, you know, these, um, stores that are shuttered and whatnot.— and failure. So bringing it back to failure is, it's not always a negative thing that, because that company, that business, that individual, they may have needed to make that decision long before and they just kept on hanging on, hanging on, hanging on, maybe just bleeding on a daily basis. And yet Again, almost like your story about finding that lesson within that, you know, I hate the word failure. Personally, I hate the word failure. It's like, I prefer misstep or something because it's like you, it's not a failure. It's just a lesson to be learned about how to pivot and adjust. But it's so true and yet people are being so hard on themselves.

But it's interesting because Many years ago, I came up with this, you know, failure is not an option, it's required kind of thing. And I had so many people say, "Don't use the word failure. People don't like that word." And I was like, "No, I— nobody likes the word. Nobody likes that concept." Right. I agree that there's lessons learned, all of those nice, warm, fuzzy, soft things. And I'm not saying, you know, that that's not important. That is important. But from my own personal experience, when I fail, if I just look at it as, oh, that was a lesson learned, great, move on kind of thing. If I fail and I feel like I fail, and if it hurts, I will then— and it kind of ties back into ambition— that's where I dig deep and I go, okay, I really, you know, had I not have had such $10,000 when I started that business in 1990, was an enormous amount of money for me.

Sure, sure.

And that hurt, right? I had to dig deep, really deep, and say, okay, I can't afford to lose that much money. I can't just write this off and say, oh well, lesson learned. No, I had to dig deep, and I had to reach out to other people and say, help, I need—

good, good.

My brother, who was living in California at the time, happened to be in the computer business, and I relied heavily on him to help me. You know, when I couldn't call somebody, any other business at midnight, I could call my brother.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And we reach out, and that, you know, that's where these teams come together. That's where creativity is spawned from, right? All things come from digging deep when it hurts, and that's why it needs to hurt. Not all the time. Sometimes you write it off and say, okay, let's learn.

Yeah, I'll do that. Yeah, you need to feel it. Well, speaking of ambition, and again, I want to remind everybody two things. One, I want you to go to smartlearningforbusinesssuccess.com, smartlearningforbusinesssuccess.com, and check out, you know, everything about Cheryl and what she does. But also check out her book The Ambition Quotient: The Missing Attribute in Your Employees. And of course you can find it on Amazon, but go to her website and learn all about her and then hit that buy the book button and it'll take you to Amazon. But check it out. So let's talk about failure and ambition. What's your take on it?

Well, once again, I think failure kind of spawns that digging deep. And ambition, you know, a lot of people will take the word ambition and failure and they're like, "Ooh, these are bad words. We don't like them. Let's erase them from our vocabulary," kind of thing. And I'm like, "No, let's embrace them." Ambition does not mean, in my definition, that success at all costs and no matter who I walk over or step over to get there. No, that's not ambition. I equate ambition with resilience. Ambition means that I'm going to rise above the challenges that I'm facing, and I'm going to use the resources available to me. I'm going to work with other people, not against other people, to get where I want to go, because I want all ships to rise at the same time. If I'm going to be ambitious, that means I don't just want to be successful. I want everyone around me to be successful. And one of the— just interestingly enough, in the process of— I, you know, I talked to Bernadette a little bit before we got on the show. We're purchasing a house, and it's out in rural Virginia. And there, when I say there's no internet, I'm not meaning that there's 1 or 2 bars or 1 or, you know, no, zero. No internet, no cell phone service, none.

You're moving there?

Yeah, I know, crazy, right? Crazy. Well, for me, I'm like, I love to disconnect. My husband, totally different story. No, no, no, no, no, he has to be connected 24/7. He is going crazy. You want to see ambition in motion? Internet away from him and you will find that he is just driven. I mean, to levels I've never seen him driven to get internet to this area. And I was able to get through my business because of COVID and various things, um, you know, a certain amount of money, um, through that program. And I've been very, very careful with it because I don't want to take it just to benefit me, right? Because that's nice, but honestly I'm not in the position a lot of people are.

Right.

So, my husband's like, "Well, let's take this money to get internet to our house." And I'm like, "That's fine, I'll do that, but only on one condition: that it benefit all of my neighbors who don't have internet either." If we can come up with a solution that will benefit all of them as well as me, then yes, I'm on board with you 100%. And there's a little ISP in town and he's been trying to get fiber, you know, to this area and not having a lot of success. So I'm joining resources, working with them, and to me that's ambition.

Right.

That's taking, you know, a situation and saying, yes, let's go get it, let's explore every option out there, let's be creative. I mean, You should see the creative solutions that they're coming up, things I've never heard of, and I'm pretty tech savvy, of how to get internet. Oh my gosh, it's crazy. I'm like, I didn't even know these things existed.

Well, and it sounds too, your description of ambition too is, it's about something that seems to a lot of people as very grandiose or very hard to achieve, And yet an individual looks at it like you did with this Wi-Fi situation. Individuals looking at it like, yeah, it might be big, you know, and it might seem unachievable, but if I pull all my resources together, that be people, monies, whatever, then like you said, we can get creative. We can come up with ideas. We can come up with solutions. We can work as a community, as a collaborative to get it done. Is that a good take on what your idea of ambition is?

It is, and it's interesting because— oh, and I hate to— I refuse, I'm not going to get into politics here because it's so toxic these days.

Yes.

But, you know, it seems in the world of politics everything is black or white. It's either you're on this side of the fence or on this side of the fence.

Right. Right.

And we hate each other if we're not on the same side.

Yeah.

And this— I talked about earlier this membership organization that I work for. They work with electrical cooperatives, and I— we don't have time to get into this, but if you ever go look at the story of electrical cooperatives and how they came about to bring electricity to rural America in the 1940s, when it— it's kind of the same exact same thing as the internet right now. Electricity was becoming a household necessity, commodity. Yeah, exactly. People in urban areas had it, the people in rural areas didn't. The internet, especially with COVID and education and all that, is becoming— you have to have it. Yes, but it's not there, and you just don't build it overnight. So one of my other websites, you know, it's called The Fifth Principle. Www.broadbandprincipal.coop. That's one of my big initiatives right now is forming co-ops to bring broadband to rural communities.

Nice.

And if you look up and understand what a cooperative is, you know, there's food co-ops, credit unions are co-ops, a lot of electrical providers in rural areas are co-ops. Once you start understanding the concept of cooperatives, there's housing co-ops, all kinds of co-ops. It's bringing people together to work and solve problems on a local level. And instead of people arguing over what we disagree about, they're like, no, let's come together on something we do agree on and find solutions to those problems.

Right.

And I just think in the world that we live in today, This idea is essential to solving the problems that we have together, right?

And creating community, you know, as opposed to being so divisive, you know, come together and, you know, let's talk it through and understand each other's differences to come up with the best options to help everybody. And I want to mention the fifth principle, dot co-op, correct? TheFifthPrincipal.coop, should you be interested at all, anyone listening or watching, check that out as well. So when it comes to failure, when it comes to ambition, when it comes to teaming at work, and say we have leaders listening and watching the program, what would you recommend to them? You know, one step, two steps, you know, what would you say to them to do when it when it comes to really leaning on failure as— it's not just an option, it's an absolute must, it's an imperative, and to help them and to help their teams recognize the value in it?

First of all, it starts with hiring the right types of people. And, you know, we look for qualifications, and when you were doing your intro, it's like, Okay, we all know this on some level. I put my resume together, I submit it to a big— especially if it's a big organization, it does— a human being's not even going to look at it. My computer is. Yep. And they're going to analyze all these keywords and decide if you have all these qualifications, right? To me, total waste of time. I realize that you get thousands of applications, you've got to find some way of filtering them out. But if you really want to hire the right kind of people for, in my opinion, what the future needs. I am— I have so many little initiatives that I'm working on, and one is helping organizations become continuous learning organizations. Used to be you could hire somebody and, you know, at least for 10, 15 years, their skills were going to be relevant and be able to contribute to your organization. Right now, you hire somebody, it's almost— it's down to about 2 or 3 years that their skills will stay relevant.

Right, right.

And if you don't hire people that have that mindset of being in a continuous learning environment and are willing to take risks, but that's where you interview when you talk to them about risks. It's not just go out and try anything and hope it works. I worked— I did a— a training program for Alcoa several years back, and I can't remember the name of it, but it was really interesting. One of the things that they were saying was their employees had a lot of good ideas, but they would just come dump their ideas on their supervisor, and the supervisor would be like, "Well, great. Nice idea." And nothing ever got done. Nothing ever changed. The person was disappointed because they thought they had a great idea, and nobody ever did anything. The supervisor's like, "Hey, I got enough on my plate. Don't dump more on my plate." Right. So what they said is, if you're going to come to us, come to us with a well-researched solution.

Yep.

Look through— and they gave them all of the different criteria, blah blah blah— and then make it actionable so that when you bring this idea, you can then lead the initiative.

Right, right.

And so you're giving people an opportunity to learn more about your business, to learn about whatever, you know, particular skill set that is that you're talking about. You're honing ambition, you know, and it also lends itself well to team building because you feel like you're part of a team. You feel like you're, you know, you're all in this together.

Yeah. And being listened to.

So I think hiring the right people, but, you know, say you're not in a position to hire nowadays, that's a reality, and all you have to work with is what you currently have. Once again, taking the same idea and saying, hey, we— this whole environment is changing the way we do business. We need your help. We need your ideas. We need your creativity. So here's this little template that says, if you have ideas, you know, follow this little checklist and Put it together, put a plan together, and bring it to us. Yeah. And get together with your teammates, work together, right?

Yeah. Just because they were managing the way they did yesterday doesn't mean they can't change how they need to manage and lead today into the future.

And it's funny because being in the training industry, people will— organizations, I should say— will have bring in these tremendous big training programs and all these complicated models for change management and blah, blah, blah. I'm like, read my book. It's super short. It's full of very simple anecdotal stories kind of things that will tell you, you want to make little changes today that will make a big difference in the future. You don't— I'm— this is crazy because people are like, well, you're just, you know, undermining your own business here. Yes, I need business, I want business, I want to come help your organization, I want you to hire me, but I'm more interested in being a missionary for this kind of— for these kind of ideas. I'd rather you read my book and take the simple ideas you can and implement them than, you know, if— than hire some, you know, big expensive company to come in and manage all this change management program.

Yeah, yeah. Change can be so simple, yet we think it's this big complicated, you know, mass monsoon when it can just be a little ripple instead of a monsoon. Just take a little ripple. And her little ripple, Cheryl Johnson's little ripple, is her book, which is a big book— not a big book, it's a big Yes, Rich, What You Need to Do type of book. Uh, The Ambition Quotient: The Missing Attribute in Your Employees. Go to smartlearningforbusinesssuccess.com and learn all about Cheryl and everything that she does and everything that we've talked about today, as well as you can go right to Amazon to get the book. And get the book for yourself, get the book for your team, get the book for the company. To embrace it. As she said, you can use her book and apply some simple things for not only for change, but also for honing meaningful conversations and for problem solving and for dealing with failure and ambition in a very positive, constructive way that will then bring your teams together and add benefit and value even in the most trying of times, like some are in, some are dealing with today. One thing I wanted to mention, Sheryl, is I think you're right in that there are a lot of companies thriving out there. And there's companies that are just surviving. And then there's companies that are dying. And so, you know, I think everybody needs to make a decision of which bucket would you like to be in. And if you want to be in the— I know thriving is such an overused word these days. But if you want to be in that thriving modality, then check out her book, The Ambition Quotient: The Missing Attribute in Your Employees. Thank you so much, Cheryl. I so appreciate you being here.

Thank you for having me. I'm excited to share my message.

Oh, you are so welcome. But, and I want to share a few more, a few other things, everyone, um, so bear with me. But, um, uh, I want you to go to smartlearningforbusinesssuccess.com, obviously. Um, I also, I was looking— oh, there it is. Also go to, on Facebook, it's RWL Tech. I love it. I love guests that make it easy. So Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, it's all RWL Tech, and you'll find Cheryl. So take a look for her, study up on her, call her, hire her, and, and also check out her book. But thank you so much. I appreciate you being here.

Thank you for having me.

You are very welcome. And for everyone here, we will be back next Tuesday at noon Eastern time for another episode of Shedding the Bitch Radio. Have a rich, prosperous week, everyone.

Bye!

Thank you for listening to Shedding the Bitch Radio with Bernadette Boas. Join Bernadette every Tuesday at noon Eastern as she helps you shift your bitches to riches. And the dialogue is always going on at sheddingthebitch.com. See you next week.