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EP 36: From Ballet to Boardroom: Liz Bruno on Bold Moves, Lifelong Learning, and the Future of L&D
Episode 365th June 2025 • Learning Matters • ttcInnovations
00:00:00 00:48:19

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In this episode of Learning Matters, host Doug Wooldridge sits down with Liz Bruno, former Chief Learning Officer at Baptist Health and a powerhouse in the L&D world. From her early days as a professional ballet dancer to leading system-wide training programs in healthcare, Liz shares her journey—and the bold mindset that’s guided her along the way.

👉 Topics we cover:

✅ Why aligning L&D with business goals matters more than ever

✅ How to shift from order-taker to strategic partner

✅ The truth about “shiny object” syndrome in learning tech

✅ The divide (and potential) between academic and corporate learning

✅ Why relationships are the key to transformation

✅ The future of L&D: agility, AI, and authentic communication

Liz brings a no-nonsense, refreshingly real perspective on what it takes to drive learning that actually moves the needle.

🔗 Connect with Liz Bruno on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/elizabethbruno/

At ttcInnovations, we help businesses create lasting change with immersive learning experiences. Through instructional strategy, design, and content development we empower employee confidence, performance, and results.

💡 Looking for custom learning experiences without licensing fees? Contact us for a free consultation! https://bit.ly/4aOhPKq

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Transcripts

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Welcome back to Learning Matters. I'm Doug Wooldridge, your host. And today I'm very excited to chat with our guest. She's an educational leader who developed a system-wide clinical coach course for new nurses, achieving over 400 completions in just six months. Featured in multiple renowned journals, such as the Association for Talent Development and the American Journal of Nursing. In a previous role, she was awarded the best practice in excellence and program innovations.

from the Florida Hospital Association, and she's Chief Learning Officer at Baptist Health. Liz Bruno, welcome to the show.

Thank you so much for inviting me. Absolutely thrilled to be here. I will tell you though that I am recently retired and now I am consulting. I it was going to be a lot quieter. I thought it was gonna be less stuff. Unfortunately, it's a good problem to have. I feel like I'm almost as busy now as I was when I was in the CLO role, but

Alright!

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Ha ha

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I'm getting to do some different things at some different paces. So that's fun. Plus I come in, I do my thing, you know, bless them and say, go for it.

That's gotta feel good. Oh, it's nice when you can walk away be like, all right I have led these horses to water now drinketh

think it's like being a grandparent, you know? yeah. You can give them back.

My theory. Yeah. Yeah. No. That's why I love being an uncle is that at the end of the day, they go back home with the parents. Yes. Yes. Well, lovely. Well, today we're to be going over some of the big questions and innovations in the world of learning and development. So I'd like to start with this, Liz. What strategy do you think matters most in learning and development today?

okay. Well, I honestly believe that for learning leaders, anybody who is in that role, even though you may have all kinds of things in your head about what needs to be trained beyond the, you know, compliance kinds of things, it really just boils down to you have to be aligned with the needs of the organization, which isn't it isn't

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learning needs, it's the performance needs, it's the business needs. So whatever those priorities are, that's where you have to be. And you have to come up with a way to do that. In a manner that's congruent with the organizational culture, even though you may be pushing the culture just a little bit, and in a way that's absorbable for people, where they are, you know, there's others that are equally or almost

as important, you know, we are in a time of lifelong learning. If you are not learning, you are falling behind. So all of the work that we're seeing on reskilling upskilling is vital, but it's not just a one and done kind of thing. It's very much going to be ongoing. I'm a big believer in faculty development. So if you've got a team of designers and

educators and copy, you know, you may have people who are working with you, contract folks, you're still responsible for making sure that they are developing in a way that's going to push the needle forward for you and for your organization. So, and then I guess I would be kind of goofy if I didn't say, cause it's almost like you don't have to say it.

But digital literacy is vital today. You can't get away from me. And I have to tell you, on some levels and in some particular areas, I had to be dragged kicking and screaming a while back into some of that. And now some of the immersive learning with the VR, cetera, et cetera. I have a dear friend, Dr. Amber Santos from Jacksonville University, actually.

And I remember arguing with her about something and she just picks up her calculator and she goes, it's a tool just like this. So yeah, really. So I have to say that no matter where you are, you know, if you're a new leader, if you're a CLO, there's always more to learn. So, and I'm still learning.

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Yeah, what is life without learning? It's the most fun thing to do in the world. And I kick myself now because I wouldn't have said that back when I was in school. But you do you do find that some of the most exciting things is just learning something new, like a new hobby or a new pastime for me, maybe a new guitar chord, you know, with without learning, every day becomes the same. And

feel.

organizations, you cannot have that. You cannot have stagnation in your organization. have to be on your feet. You have to be able to keep pushing forward. how do you now from the consultant side of things, how do you take that mindset in to an organization that wants to change their, maybe their learning habits or just maybe restructure an entire program? How do you showcase

that type of mindset to them to get buy-in.

You know, there's a great line and I'm gonna I'm definitely gonna bastardize this line because I'm in front of me. But really, it's from the book Alice in Wonderland. And one of the characters, I guess it's one of the queens says, here, takes all the running you can do just to stay in the same place. And I have used that line, though, generally better because I

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Thought about it and looked up the actual reference, but not for today. So I use that because people can relate to it because they can relate to it in their personal life. They can relate to it in their professional life or their academic life, whatever. I think given everything of today, organizations who are not ready or are very resistant are operating out of fear.

And I understand operating out of but what you, as that consultant or learning leader who's in house, you have to leverage the L and D function to be a tool for organizational success rather than, you know, we're still to this day and we've been doing it since, I don't even know. It feels like the time of Charlemagne, but.

mean. But it's people are still doing the order taking thing. Sure. they don't know how to move beyond it. And so one of the things that I try to focus on is what are the performance gaps? Not the learning needs, because we're going to focus on performance needs. What are the what are the performance gaps?

and link those performance gaps and the strategies of the organization together and then work with the appropriate stakeholders and some that you're going to grab in anyway, because you know they will eventually be important. yeah. yeah. yeah. I'm always about buying bourbon for like finance people, you know, sometimes you simply just have to go to the liquor store, but.

But really you have to show them that the learning and development function will help them with that. It's hard for people because they're used to just saying, well, you know, let's train everybody with an elbow and a gallbladder. Right. And the problem is then if it's not related to a knowledge deficit, nothing changes. And then they're like, well, we need either more training or different training rather than looking at.

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All of the other reasons. So I'm a big believer when I go in some to anyone's organization and I've consulted before as well. It's all about teaching about human performance improvement. I don't care if you're talking healthcare, if you're talking banking, if you're talking plumbing or you know, retail, what what's going on. So when you teach and give them the gestalt of

human performance improvement so they understand that there are all kinds of factors that impact performance. And if the only thing you're focusing in on is training, you're gonna miss a whole lot of things. Do remember? I don't even know when this book was written, but the knowing doing gap. I know that's an oldie but goodie, but it was about...

Because people will say, if they know how to do it right, they'll do it. Always every time. And that's a lovely, lovely delusional idea. But it is a delusional idea. Going in and helping people see that you're going to bring them solutions for problems they have and help them prevent some future problems.

Yes. Yes.

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then all of a sudden you become a much more important person in their world. And you then become someone they go to. know, we, we still good God in heaven talk about having a seat at the table. No, no, no, no, Invite them out to lunch, make them come to your table. So yeah, that's my thought.

Very nice.

Have you always worked in healthcare or was there something that drew you to the industry of healthcare overall?

Well, I had absolutely no intention of being in healthcare. Zipnada. I was a professional ballet dancer. I was very, very young. And I did it for a living for about a year and half and broke my left foot. And there's some hardware in there now. And then I became a nurse. So over low those many years, I

Yeah.

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always taught part time and did, you know, work in healthcare in psych. By background, I'm an advanced practice psychiatric nurse. And I've worked in, you know, I've worked in acute care psych, I worked in forensic psych with the criminally insane. I worked, you know, in all different areas of psych private practice.

But I was also, um, in the army reserve and a wonderful psychiatrist, um, one day said to me, you know, captain, that was a long time ago. He said, you really are a very good teacher and you have you thought about doing that in your corporate world or coming full-time active duty? was not going to go full-time active duty, but I did start to think about that.

And over time transitioned into L &D, L &D administration, and you know, 150 years later, look where I am.

You

So that was the pathway. But I've worked with people in many other industries over the years.

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Do you find more red tape in the healthcare industry as opposed to other industries?

That's an excellent question. will say we have a lot and when I don't regulatory compliance, you know, everybody's got compliance training, right? I don't know what you're doing. Everybody's got it in healthcare because we're dealing with people's lives. Yeah, there's a lot of. Regulations, there are tons of regulations designed to keep our patients safe, right?

As far as red tape goes, mean in terms of being able to institute something in the organization?

Exactly. Like, let's say you want to change a training program and they maybe want to use a new tool or you would like to use a new tool, but you have to go through legal to be like, okay, is all of this data that we're implementing in this new tool, is it going to be safe? Are we going to have our own sandbox that we get to craft in? Those type of things.

That's an excellent question. Here's here are some of the elements. I think that go into that first of all, it's money. Yeah, money and time. You know how much time are you going to take away from what my people my team in our case learners are away from you know their actual job and then of course interoperability, know are is what you want to do going to

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mess up anything else we're doing. Will the system A and system B talk to each other? One of the things that I think is, and it's a cautionary tale, and I just had to deal with this with, with a client who came back from a conference. So excited about this new shiny thing. Ooh, shiny. this is great. It can do everything but rub your feet.

You know, blah, blah. And, you know, I had to sit with that lovely human and talk about, we drilled down on this. did it together. Frankly, it's a very immature product. It is very shiny. It is very new. But when I asked those difficult questions about, it going to work with this and is it congruent with that? And how much time is it going to take?

to get it up and running and what's the customer service? Well, they don't have much of a background. You don't know. that is one of those things where you really, as a leader, and I don't care if you're the L &D person who is part of a large conglomerate organization, people are still gonna come to you and go, ooh, shiny.

You've got to be what we used to call in psych. You got to be doing reality orientation. And asking those hard questions, you know, and sometimes then people are sad and they almost cry because you're like raining on their parade.

Yeah, I brought this whole new product to change the way that we do our learning culture here. And why can't we just implement it right away? Right.

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Absolutely. It's one of your stakeholders. That's when you know, I always talk about having emotional and expertise capital in the bank and you build that over time so that when you start asking the hard questions, you're not going to get the label of, they're just resistive or they're just being defensive or they

don't want to help us. And so that goes back to, I'll tell you, yeah, you've got to know what's going on in L &D. You've got to be able to grow your team. You've got to have digital literacy. But if you as a learning leader don't have the ability to form and nurture and maintain relationships, you will either fail or you will never be as successful as you could be.

Having those relationships takes work, takes time, know, building trust, being that person who says, let me see if I can help you with that. Why don't we sit down and talk about training may not be the answer here, but let's talk about things that might be. go back to that whole HPI kind of model that I think is really important for learning leaders to understand.

Was there like an aha moment in your career that led you to this type of mindset of like, sometimes you gotta have little tough love here when trying to get people on the right or at least keep that train moving straight instead of going all squirrely.

yeah, well you know, I was a psychotherapist, so I have all kinds of tools.

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Ha ha ha!

I can't tell you the number of times I had to break bad news to someone who wanted things to be different, but didn't want to change. Well, why can't everybody else with an elbow and a gallbladder change? So there have been many moments where I've had to work with people, but because I truly do focus so much on relationships, it's easier. So when you start that new job,

in L and D or you're going in as a consultant. Go for some wins, get some quick wins, build a little bit of credibility, get to know your folks. are it's not just what are the business needs? What are the things that are keeping your stakeholders up at night? Some of them are very small. Some of them are bigger. You can't necessarily fix everything, but first of all, being a good ear and helping

your stakeholders and your peripheral stakeholders begin to connect the dots is very powerful, very, very powerful. And that helps you then be able to say some of those harder things to folks, you know?

Yeah, and I think that.

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Not only is that allow people to be more appreciative of, of giving that little tough love, but they feel like you're the person that is on their side that needs to tell them this and they need to, to listen to you because not only are you correct in the direction that we need to go here in this organization, but you've been with them and have always been that, that angel on their shoulder.

Yeah. Yeah.

And sometimes you got to be the devil, but for the most part, you're there with a helping hand guiding them in the right direction.

I think that's so powerful. I've always told people a I will never lie to you. I may tell you things you don't want to hear, but I am out for success for everybody. I want you to be successful if if a stakeholder or someone who is being resistive understands

that you want them to be successful, that you're not trying to stand in their way.

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then they're much more willing to listen to you. You know, even when you're telling them tough things, you know, so you look for something you can, there's almost always something you can agree on.

Yeah. Is there a challenge that you've had to overcome that might be your proudest moment in the LND world that you can think of?

Yikes, proudest moment. Well, I've had a lot of them. been very, you know, I feel like I have been lucky. You want to talk about the angels on the shoulder? I have been a lucky woman. I'm very proud of the fact that every place I've worked, a lot of places for which I've consulted, I've left people.

with much more in the way of knowledge, skills and abilities abilities than when I came in the door. I'm such a big believer in faculty development. You know, that whole law of requisite variety, we used to talk about dreadfully terrible people. So talk about surgeons and surgeons, they only want to cut people open.

You know, if the, is it? The, if the only tool you have in your toolbox is a nail or a hammer, everything looks like a nail. So giving people and teaching people how to look at problems, truly learn how to assess the problem. You know, a big design thinking person to really do that comprehensive assessment. and

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Yeah.

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Dig deeper when you think you have the answers still dig deeper. Talk to more people. Talk to the people doing the job. Don't just talk to the to the bosses because some of them haven't done the work, you know, since the Carter administration. So you want to kind of, know, you want to make sure you're getting a clear view when you do that. You are going to generate better solutions.

Because you're going to define the problem much more accurately. So I think the proud moments have been when I have stepped away and watched people I've nurtured get to the point where they are just hot stuff. And I have some pretty hot stuff people that I've worked

When we were meeting about doing this podcast, you mentioned something really interesting to me. We just briefly touched on the subject, but I kind of want to talk about the differences between learning and development in the academia world and learning and development in the corporate world. Where do you see maybe the great divides between those two different areas of learning?

Yeah, you know, it's it's very interesting because I've always taught part time somewhere in some academic institution. I think things are changing in academia. Obviously they are. If you just read the newspaper, you're changing. But I think in in the corporate world, you know, it's very much time is money. What's the strategy? What are the problems?

How do we do it? What do we do? Academia is more focused on giving that broad knowledge, skills and abilities, depending on what you're studying. And I think that I always separated into, which is probably not a good separate, not necessarily the best word. There's workplace learning and there's academic learning.

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I think a lot of things have changed, but I remember when I first started doing some work in academia, it was, you know, post-master's time and I'm teaching, you know, psychiatric nursing. And one of the things that made me crazy was people were still teaching things that they had taught when I was an undergraduate the same way, you know, and so many things are different.

But here's the thing that's beautiful today. You. I love seeing people. Who are in practice, whatever the practice is now, obviously I'm from a practice discipline, nursing is a practice discipline, you know, medicine is a practice discipline. So many clinical kinds of things are, but in the in the business schools, people who are actually doing the job who are teaching.

So I think it's important to that that we can help each other so much because the workplace learning specialists can help the academics and the academics have so many resources and so much knowledge around research, et cetera, et cetera. And when we step away from the great divide of

Well, you know they're in their ivory tower. You know what they say that about people in corporate world to what are those people know for the love of God all they want to do is just throw people into the job when we stop that.

Us and them, that's when you find the sweet spot. But there will always be times. mean, literally, there will be times when you are dealing with those issues. I can tell you not terribly long ago, was dealing in a, I was in a situation where I was on a conference call.

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with some folks in academia from up north. And it was, I felt like there was a real sense of us in them because I was the consultant and they were, you know, trying to hold onto this is the way we do it here. And you know, what I ended up doing was it's not, you know, either or it can be and.

Yeah.

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And that, you know, decreased a little of that reactivity. And I focused on what was important to them because I was not trying to minimize that which they had done for many, many years, but with, as the environment is changing, we have to change. And so I did a little horse trading. I did, I did. And I, I talked about.

what I would be willing to do for them, what I could give them. You know, I have this thing that I do and I'd love to do it for your team and blah, blah, blah. If you would find it useful again, getting into an adversarial situation, nobody wins. So looking for that sweet spot is kind of where I go.

Yeah, it sounds like you're just balancing between keeping a culture that's already existed, but also being as agile as you possibly can. you know, it sounds like the corporate world tends to be more leaning towards that agile approach of being like, we got to, we got to move. got to move. We have not only our stakeholders, we have shareholders too that would like to see us succeed so that their bank accounts are happy.

No, I was just going to say, and then on the other side of that, while the academia world is incredible at building a culture so that you can have really cemented ideas, it sounds like they may need to be pushed a little to the agile side occasionally to just kind of keep up with the times.

Exactly. I have learned so much from my academic colleagues. I never stop. There are so many, many brilliant, brilliant people that I just kind of, I want to be one of those people that just sits down at somebody's feet and drinks a hot cup of tea and just, or maybe some wine and listens because they're so brilliant. But I use this image, you know, having been a dancer, right? if you think about,

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ballet dancers you think about people boxers you think about fencers actually have a sword behind me I was just noticing very cool I do it's not mine but you know a sword and teapots that's definitely multiple.

The exact combo depending on who the house guest is.

Absolutely. But your weight has to be forward. When your weight is forward on your feet, you can move in any direction much more easily, right? If you're boxing, if you're fencing, if you're dancing, you don't have to shift before you move because you're already there. So I love the term agile. Absolutely. Because agility means

having your weight forward, whether that's learning new things, being willing to try new things, throwing spaghetti at the wall, playing with AI, whatever that is. Having your weight forward is what's going to help you be successful. And if you're a consultant or an internal person, it's what's going to help the organization be successful. But I never want to say.

negative things about academia because I still feel like I have so much to learn and there are so many great opportunities today to with the research that's going on and the brilliant people in academia. I just I'm gonna I'm gonna run out of life before I out of curiosity.

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With that in mind, are there any top trends that you see might be the future of LND?

You know, think people are going to have to, I go back to that, that whole digital literacy piece, you know, we have got to learn to work with what we have. Now I can, I'm allowed to say things about healthcare cause I'm a healthcare human, right? I'm a good person. to this day, I still hear.

Oh, the new ones today, they don't want to work. They have the attention span of a, you know, a nat or whatever, you know, we've the good old days are not coming back and we still, you know, if you're not willing to change, you spend your life grieving that which was right. So our, our designers, our educators,

are people who deal with our data. We all have to be willing to think differently, learn more, be more data driven because frankly, in the corporate world, everything is boiling down to the data. So if you don't speak data, if you don't speak the language, you're going to be way, way behind the power curve.

I do believe that a lot of, you know, I'm a big experiential learning person, you know, simulation, medical simulation I've been doing since it feels like again, a hundred years, but not really, but a long time. And you know, the, the use of VR, the use of AI, there's so much going on now, both in the corporate world and in academia around how do we harness AI?

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to help us teach better, learn more. How do we help our students, our learners, become more comfortable being able to access information, evaluate information, because there's so much out there that's horrible, absolutely horrible. Who wrote this? I want to hunt them down. Create content.

You know, we have so many brilliant people working for us who are able to create content, but our learners can create content. So we have got to be able to speak the language and overcome the resistance, overcome the anxiety, because when you stay fear-based, you get paralyzed. It's like that deer in the headlights thing.

Yeah. And I think fear is such an easy emotion to come to when it comes to making massive decisions, because we're not talking about like the idea of changing a learning organization or culture within an organization sounds like it's an easy project, but we're talking about hundreds of hours of work to recreate that we're talking about in massive organizations, millions of dollars of

that are on the table to do this. So fear does kind of seem like the first thing to jump to, but I would hope that with today's stakeholders and today's organizations, the excitement of changing things up and being on that cutting edge is what drives them more so than fear.

Yeah, I agree. I agree completely. so again, showing folks the totality of possibilities. And I'm going to help you with your problems. I'm going to help you with your performance problems. I'm going to help you with your leadership problems. know, leadership training. It's such a big, broad and deep kettle of fish.

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And there are so many elements today that have to be taken in. And again, people are grieving. the people I had working for five years ago, 10 years ago, you know, blah, blah, blah. They're not the same. This is where we are today. How do you. You know, connect. How do you communicate and the whole communication thing? It's going to feel like I'm going down a rabbit hole. So just stick with. A rabbit hole. I'm staying. All right. So.

me

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No, what word we're with

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Honestly, I may have told you this or I might have hallucinated that I told you. I don't know. I was giving a talk, I don't know, six years ago, maybe seven years ago to some, huge room of brand new nurses. And I was talking about communication techniques. And I, I of course was, you know, saying now all the stuff they taught you in nursing school about therapeutic communication, 50 % of it. Okay. But let's talk about.

strategies for communicating and connecting with your patients, with their families, with your colleagues, with your boss. And this lovely, brilliant young woman came up to me later and she said, Ms. Liz, I work in the South, Ms. Hey, I'm, well, brilliant, brilliant, wonderful people.

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She said, I don't have your words. And I said, well, you don't have to have my words. A, I've been doing this stuff forever and I'm a psych person and blah, blah. And she goes, no, no, no. I would be much more comfortable texting my patients. And I have to tell you, I tried to keep my face straight. I, you I was a psychotherapist. can, you know, I think my eyes really wide, but I'm not sure.

But here's the thing, if you really think about it, so much communication is done via text. I actually used a meme on something I did a while back, and it said, don't call me. I don't use my phone for that. I really believe

If you also look at the parallel process of the increase in depression and loneliness,

we do a whole lot of ostensible communication without connection. And so the ability to communicate and listen actively, I do a talk, it's still one of my best ones. It's called the seven deadly sins of listening. And it's very funny, but it's real because so many people

Yeah.

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think they're communicating and they are not. And then they wonder why the disconnect, why the problems, why aren't we getting the progress we need? Why are we in therapy? Why are we whatever? And it's that piece of communicating, really communicating, really listening without

waiting for the other person to just shut up. Like we're waiting for them to take a breath so we can jump in there and tell them what they need to know. And I see that so much. And now with how ubiquitous the digital tools are.

that it's even more difficult. And while the utility of the digital tools is unquestionable.

by the same token, what are we missing? How are we not connecting? And so I believe, you know, it's almost like someone said to me, you're talking out of both sides of your mouth. This was, again, a client, I'm talking to them and doing some pre-work. And they said, well, you're talking about technology on one hand, and all those old, and this is a direct quote, all those old soft skills too.

I said, this is not an either or, this is an and.

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Yes.

Yeah, I think my least favorite thing that my generation memes about with work stuff is that this meeting could have been an email. Like, no, we have to, we have to meet. That's a part of how we build a culture, a true working culture. And that's how we get to know each other and the nuances of each other. can't get that in an email. Not to mention a lot of folks are now using ChatGPT to write their emails, which makes it even less personal, but yes.

No.

I'm telling you, Billy, you're going to sell it. But I love, I love a, I love chat GPT for many things, brainstorming, all of that kind of thing. It's fabulous, but you're right. And so people are not connecting. They're not communicating. They don't get to know each other. You get them in a live meeting, which is rare, more and more rare. And they're like,

that's who you are? Really? You don't look like what I thought you'd look like, you know, because also so many times they won't even show their face. So you're a disembodied voice at best. Yeah. When you're building a team, when you're moving toward performance goals, if you're the leader of that, whatever it is, you've got to

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Mm-hmm

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help people see that they need to be connected. And a lot of folks will push back on that. I don't need to, I work remotely. I don't need to be connected to anybody. Okey dokey. And that may be true for certain things, but it's not true for everything.

Yeah, I think that the whole point of working together is to be together. Otherwise, everyone at that point becomes a consultant, even though they're on an employee salary, they're getting the benefits and stuff. And while the consultant lifestyle is awesome in a lot of ways, what you do end up missing a lot of times is that connection that you really don't get when you aren't working with a continual team of people.

Absolutely. You know, if I were a betting woman...

Am I a betting woman? Betting woman, maybe. But if I were looking at you, I'd be willing to wager some pretty serious jewelry that you are a person who has many, many facets, sort of like really good diamond. Okay. Almost everybody's that way. You're you mentioned before guitar chords. So you're a musician. You like music. The

creativity piece, if I didn't know and hadn't heard you say, well, I got to learn a new guitar chord. I wouldn't know that that may be a way for me. If I'm your boss or I'm a consultant working with you, that I could use an analogy that would get into your brain. I could use a music analogy, right? When you get to know more than someone's LinkedIn profile.

(:

for love of God. People are more than their LinkedIn profile, though mine desperately needs updating. I know that, please, dear God. It does, it really does. But.

Bye.

(:

You have to learn about people in order to help yourself and them harness the totality of who they are. You know, there's critical thinking, but there's also creativity, right? And they are not mutually exclusive. And the best work comes when you can harness both.

Yes, I 100 % agree. You've been giving our audience some incredible insight and breaching some philosophical arguments that we don't tend to breach all the time here on the podcast. So I really appreciate that. If you could go back in time, let's say to early 20s, Liz.

And you had the opportunity to give yourself advice, not necessarily like the younger generation or anything, but your self-advice. What might that be?

Don't date a man who uses more hair products than you do. No. Well, that is very true. I think that's a standard that every woman should be aware of. I think...

Ha!

(:

I'm a bearded man, I might use more hair product than my wife, but...

Yeah, I think it's important to have standards. Somebody once said to me, it's important to have standards no matter how low, right? If I were, if I were giving my young self, advice, I would say be bold earlier. became a bold, active oriented kind of person who pushed boundaries, but, it was in my probably.

mid 30's that I started doing that. I think having stopped dancing and became a nurse, I was feeling around and I was tentative. And so when I started working with in forensic psych nursing, I realized that I didn't have to always go by the playbook.

Yeah.

You know, and that was helpful. And then later, like getting into that, I will, took more chances and kept looking for opportunities. And I still say I was one of the luckiest people in the world because of the people I'd met, the people who mentored me, the people I had as professors, as mentors, you know, all of that.

(:

Take chances if you can. Now, you know, it's easy for someone to say that when they are of a certain age and they have no children and all of that. That's very true. But you can be bold in small ways too. Don't look for opportunities to grow constantly. That would be what I would say.

Yeah.

(:

Well, thank you so much for that. Before I get you out of here, where can people connect with you, Liz?

All right, no judging y'all. I'm telling you right now.

judgment here. This is a no judgment podcast.

profile, you're going to go, Oh, well, she's, There's a lot that's not in there, but you can connect with me on LinkedIn. And I so appreciate the opportunity to chat with you. Um, it was fun. And if I can do anything to be of service, just let me know. I am having a wonderful time in this consulting world and taking saying yes, when I want to and say no, and I don't want to, but,

I really appreciate the time, so thank you for having me.

(:

No, the pleasure has been all mine. And thank you again for coming on the show. Thank you listeners. If you learned something today or had a laugh, tell somebody about the show for us. Thanks again, Liz.

Okay, thanks again. Bye-bye.

This has been another episode of Learning Matters. As always, like and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. And don't hesitate to reach out to us here at TTC Innovations to learn more about how we can help you with your training needs. See you next time.

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