"You can't get transformation just from information" - a conversation with David Thomson - The Talent Equation Podcast

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hi everyone, Stewart here before we get into today's podcast,
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Sometimes that impact goes as far as family members and

(00:23):
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(00:43):
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(01:04):
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(01:26):
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(01:46):
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If al Wes start today's podcast, I just wanted to
sort of say, there's a quick health warning. This podcast
has depictions of abuse, alcoholism, racism and bullying and there
is some language in the podcast that some people might

(02:09):
find offensive.

Speaker 2 (02:10):
Welcome to the Talent Equation Podcast. If you are passionate
about helping young people to unleash their potential and want
to find ways to do that better, then you've come
to the right place. The Talent Equation podcast seeks to
answer the important questions facing parents, coaches, and talent developers

(02:31):
as they try to help young people become the best
they can be. This is a series of unscripted, unpolished
conversations between people at the razor's edge of the talent
community who are prepared to share their knowledge, experiences and
challenges in an effort to help others get better faster. Listen, reflect,

(02:52):
and don't forget to join the discussion at the Talent
Equation dot co dot UK.

Speaker 3 (02:58):
Enjoy the show.

Speaker 1 (03:14):
Well, I'm really looking forward to this particular podcast because
this is a I say I often say people are
long overdue guest. This is a long overdue guest because
I first said this gentlement speak at a conference that
was organized like the Chartered Institute for Management Sport and
Physical Activities. Since this was at least maybe four or
five years ago, perhaps I can't remember anyway, David Thompson,

(03:36):
Welcome to the Talent Equation.

Speaker 3 (03:38):
Thank you. I'm delighted to be on. And yeah, it
was four years ago as the beginning, just before COVID.

Speaker 1 (03:44):
So yeah, just four years ago, now, yeah, that takes
it back. Doesn't know it was just before. So you've
been pretty busy and we've got a lot to talk
about because there's a lot of things that you've been doing.
But you know, I want to just go back to
the beginning. And I was captivated by your story when
I heard you speak at the conference and not necessarily

(04:06):
expecting you to do that that whole thing again, but
I would love to just get you to tell your
story and tell a little bit about, you know, the
stuff you did and have done and the journey that
you've been on and then we can then segue in
to start talking about some of the stuff we want
to talk about.

Speaker 3 (04:19):
Yeah, I suppose if I wind back to my story
growing up as a little kid, we were really poor
in our household. I mean like really poor. There was
no food banks around, Like I was born in nineteen
sixty nine, so middle of the seventies. Like, we were
so skinny it was unbelievable. I remember stealing potatoes with

(04:41):
my father our people's allotments at six years old, because
we never have any food. And literally the potatoes are
built in like these triangle things. I remember putting potatoes
in there and then putting those potatoes into like this
kind of dufflent bag thing, just so we've got enough food,
and then coming home and making chips. My parents liked

(05:02):
to drink a lot. I was brought by. They weren't alcoholics,
but you know, they were practicing every week and trying
to make it there. But there was My stepfather was
a little white guy called Jimmy, and he liked to
drink a lot, and he was like really argumentative. I
think he really wasn't happy with his hand, with his
light he got, you know, it was with my mum

(05:23):
and probably didn't want to be with her. He'd got
this kid, and obviously I'm half casting being colored in
those days, he probably didn't like his hand. So every
week he'd go out to the pub, He get drunk,
he spend all his money in the book is then
come back. He wrecked the house, beat my mum up,
beat me up, and so you know, it was a
really violent upbringing as a kid. And you know, all

(05:44):
I wanted to do as a kid was I wanted
to be rich because we were always skin and I
wanted to be tough because because of the violence. I
remember being ten years old and thinking to myself, We've
lived in nine different houses, right, and I've been to
five different schools and I was only ten, so you

(06:05):
can imagine what the education system was like. And then
I'm dyslexic as well, and so it was. It was
a tough, tough start in life going through that kind
of an upbringing where you got that disruption, n ue
to wet the bed a lot. You know, Like until
I was eight years old, I wet the bed all
the time. So it was like this terrified little kid,

(06:25):
but I was I was pretty good at maths and
also I'm dyslexic as well, so at school it didn't
get much easier because they didn't have dyslexia back in
the seventies and the eighties. It was I just thought
you were a bit thick, you know, And everybody remembers
the kid where you had to read out like in
front of the class. I was the kid that stuttered,
so you know, it was. It was a tough, tough upbringing.

(06:48):
But at sixteen, I'd decided I'd become a soldier. I'd
go into the army. I'd left school and I've got
no qualifications. And you know this, this was like nineteen
eighty five. UB forty were singing you are my one
in ten because nobody really had job. So all my

(07:09):
mates were going in the army and I didn't really
want to go in the army, but because of my
friends were going in, I thought I'll go and I'll
become a soldier. And when I got into the army,
it was the eleventh of March nineteen eighty six. Status
Quo was singing You're in the army now, Oh, you're
in the army now. I'm sure you remember the song,
and for the first time, everybody was on the same level,

(07:32):
and there was a way of behaving and it was
really good for me. Not that I liked being a soldier,
but I was really fit, and so I became the
best recruited physical training. So I got some recognition and
I realized I wasn't thick. The Army had a way
of training you as a system, and so I realized,
you know that I was all right, and I did
all right. So I became the best recruit of physical training.

(07:54):
And then I went over into the army because I
didn't like the Army work, and I got into boxing.
And I've got a picture here like this, This is
a young David Thompson at nineteen years old. I got
voted the best boxer in the battalion, you know, and
you know, like winging was always a big thing. From
there is a kid. So I learned. I learned box

(08:16):
and I was good at it, right, really good at it,
probably because maybe my Jamaican heritage, but you know, I
was quite I was quite good. So you know, that
was like my starting life. And you know, from the
army nineteen eighty nine, nineteen ninety I came out of
the Army and Bobby Brown I remember things from songs

(08:38):
like Bobby Brown was singing My Prerogative. There was a
song out called Dirty Cash, and I wanted to make
some cash. But I took my first job in Dr
Martin's Shoe Factory, which was an airwhere boot factory where
they made the Bobber boots and the used to send
them around the world. And you know, I used to
work in the packing and dispatch book blase in there
and I just come out the army and I had

(08:59):
one hundred and thirty a week, and you know, that
was that was the money on hundred and thirty. That
was I was one hundred and fifty, but it was
one hundred and thirty after tax. And I was living
there back at my parents' house and not really knowing
what to do. And there was a guy called Paul
Eilif who was the brother in law of my first

(09:19):
another girl called Lisa. He gave me a book called
The Success System That Never Fails by a guy called
William Clement Stone, and that was the book that changed
my life. I remember sitting amongst the boxes, you know,
and it was sort of September nineteen ninety and this
big guy guy called Andy Mobbs. He was doing my
job for me, doing all the packing. I'm sitting there

(09:41):
and I read sixty three pages of this book and
it talks about, you know, William Clement Stone being brought
up by a single parent, something I would have loved.
He lived in it was one hundred. He became a
billionaire and he owned an insurance business called the Aon Corporation,
and you know, he talked about how sales was a
profession that you could learn. Well, I would love to

(10:02):
be a professional sales guy. So I started reading his
book and then I've got a job working for his company,
or I started learning about being a financial advisor, you know,
and then you know, and I went out and I
became a financial advisor, working for William Clement Stone and
selling insurance direct door to door to the public. And

(10:27):
I've described that as the Says of sales, right, because
you go in and you start learning about positive mental
attitude and Socrates, you get this amazing training, but actually
selling cold calling, you know, to the public. It was
really tough and I found it really hard, but I
knew I'd found my place in you know, like in
terms of I knew I wanted to do sales. The

(10:50):
thing I found most fascinating about sales though, it was
you could just talk to somebody and you can make
a lot of money. But I could have a conversation.
I could make five hundred pounds by just having a conversation,
whereas in the shoe factory had to work all week
with that. But you could have a conversation with something
you met five hundred cruit And I was like, oh
my god, this is amazing. But nobody ever taught the

(11:14):
component parts that made up this thing called a superstar
sales professional. You couldn't go and get a degree in sales,
and I was, you know, from my perspective, I was like,
you know, how do I keep this job where I
don't have to go and work. All I do is
talk to people and I can earn all of this money.
And nobody could answer that question. There was no professional guidance.

(11:36):
You know, you could do the odd training course or
read the book, or somebody would tell a bit of
a story, but nobody had put together the component parts
to build you to be. Like if you wanted to
be become a surgeon and you wanted to work in
a hospital, there was a roadmap to but there was
no on ramp to being this top top sales profession.
But anyway, I went on and I started studying everything

(11:58):
that sat behind sales, and I got my first big
break when I became a mortgage advisor and mortgage advisors.
I couldn't even spell mortgage at the time, but it
was June nineteen ninety two seven interviews. I got this
job working for this company called Connell Estate Agents as
a mortgage advisor, and believe it or not, I didn't

(12:18):
have a clue what mortgage was. We'd lived in council houses.
We'd been evicted from our council houses for not paying rent.
And the next thing you know, I've got this job
as a mortgage advisor. And I think the reason they
gave me the job was because I'd got a job
as a financial advisor working for William clement Stone and
I was doing my bit selling insurance and doing out there.
We didn't have anything to do with mortgages. And I

(12:40):
was fit, and I was young, and I was strong,
and I was determined, and I've got into personal development.
I started consuming all these audio cassettes in my car,
and I think they thought, well, he's worth a go
and then my first week I haned five hundred pounds
and I thought I've earned as much in one week
as I'd even in a month in the shoe factory.
And my thoughts were, how do I keep this? It

(13:01):
felt like, you know, like you're robbing a living, Like
you know, I bowgled my way into this industry and
that was, I guess, you know the reason why when
I started in October nineteen ninety to two till twenty
twenty four, I've studied everything and worked with the best
people that have worked walked the planet from a sales perspective,

(13:24):
and then I went on to become the top financial
advisor in the UK and the mortgage industry because I
studied all the components within sales. You know, that was
that was that's that's that's that had been my journey
and obviously.

Speaker 1 (13:39):
No now so this is interesting, So I just want
to go right back to tell the story, I mean,
just to really fascinating journey. You mentioned at the start
that you you want to be rich and want to
be cuugh hm, and a lot of that was driven
by the environment that you were in. You know, you
wanted one where you know, you didn't have money, and

(13:59):
you were vicially lived in fear continuously, and though you
know that there was a lot of violence in there,
and you wanted to be able to protect yourself and
others that you know, you love. So like, I'm really
fascinated generally speaking by how environments shaper, and you know,
you touched on the idea that you know, you came
away with these sort of driving ambitions, that these are

(14:22):
two sort of life goals. But like you know, and
then of course, if you go into the army, of
course you know you're relatively secure financially and you have
a lot of safety because you know you're surrounded by
other tough people. Right, So there's a question in my
mind around like what was it that made you then
want to step away from being in the armed forces
and then move into a sort of the business world,
you know, which is like a very different landscape, isn't it.

Speaker 3 (14:45):
The army. The army is a funny place. I mean,
there was a lot of racism in the army when
I'm going into the which is what I've experienced that home,
Like I remember nineteen eighty seven being in Cellar, West Germany.
I've been in I've been top recruiting physical training. I've
gone through nine months worth of training, you know, joining
on the eleventh of March. Then, you know, literally just

(15:08):
before Christmas, I'd gone to my battalion, the second Battalion,
the Royal Anglian Regiment, and it and it was fine
to be racist then you could be. There was no
mobile phones or anything like that, so and it was
and there there was bullying in there as well. That
was like part of the game where I was being
told to go to the Nafi nigger and I took

(15:29):
that like, you know, I you know, I was the
hardest kid in my year at school, so I was
really tough, like I genuinely like I'm a tough nut,
and I thought I hated it and I wasn't going
to do. You know. I beat my dad and put fourteen.
My stepfather was only five foot all, but I beat
him at fourteen. So now I got into the Army,
I've gone through I'd become the best recruited physical training.

(15:50):
Next thing, you know, I got to the battalion and
racism was a you know, it was a strong eight
and and bullying was just part of the course. You
were expected. You were in, new kid in, and all
new kids got this. They're expected to be going and
doing what they were told. And I was like, well,
I'm a sold job the same as you. But I
wasn't treated like that. And I had you know, I

(16:10):
was well balanced. I had a chip on both shoulders.
So you've got this kid who's come from a terrible environment,
and you know, he's gone through training and he's been
promoted to best recruit physical training, he's gone to battalion.
The next thing you know, he's told he's back at
the bottom again, and racism is high and bullying side.
I'm not having any of it. I'm not I'll fight
the world because that's what I've been doing. And so

(16:32):
my my out on my arm ramped to get out
of that was to learn how to box. And people
were like righteous about telling me what I should be
doing in that. Then you know they'd come in, they're
trying and hit me, and I you know, I beat
a couple of people up, and so I thought, how
do I solve this problem? And my way to solve

(16:52):
the problem was learned to be tougher than all of
those guys learned how to box, and so I learned
to box so that nobody could hurt me ever, and
I wanted to be genuinely hard and so and also
to buck the systems. I was like, well, you better
be brilliant if you're going to tell me what to do.
So that was that the Army. Whilst I was in there,
I did not like it. I'd like to say, I'd

(17:14):
like to dam I didn't like any of the army,
but I needed it. So I left the Army like
my ass was on fire. I was desperate to get out, desperate.
Most people were in the army that you know that
are soldiers like I was in. Most of them are
talking about the day they're going to leave. And you know,
looking back now, I should have appreciated it more, but
at the time it felt like it was a prison

(17:35):
sentence and when you sign up to do it, you
have to do time.

Speaker 1 (17:39):
Interesting, that's a really interesting quote there. I didn't like it,
but I needed.

Speaker 3 (17:44):
It, Yeah, I did. I needed it.

Speaker 1 (17:46):
What was it? What was it? You would say that
you needed what the structure, the rigor the you know,
you could have done You could have done with all
that without without the abuse, obviously, but it was the
other things. It gave you right.

Speaker 3 (17:57):
Well, the Army, the Army in issue factory both brilliant
because what they gave me was a system so many times,
same as William Clement Specstone's book The Cell system never fails.
Like sales is a system. We need to have systems,
processes in order to be in order to be successful.
Without them, it falls apart. So the Army was a system,

(18:19):
and it taught me about leadership. It taught me about fitness,
It taught me about order, structure, control, integrity, discipline, and
I did good as a soldier and leading people. You know,
we went to Northern Ireland where people got killed and
blown up. So the Army was a brilliant, brilliant system
for business because it's showed, you know, standard operational procedures.

(18:39):
There's a brilliant, brilliant system. It's two factory manufacturing. If
you want to produce a pair of airway boots, you
have there's a system for doing it. So you've got
to be consistent.

Speaker 1 (18:51):
Yeah, what you just said there about the the imbing
brilliant for business. I know a lot of people who
you know, kind of their exi military in the kind
of corporate working in the kind of corp World or
as kind of you know, developers of others. And it
strikes me that there are so many like back to
military life that then are valuable in the outside world,

(19:14):
so to speak.

Speaker 3 (19:15):
Absolutely, and I mean not everybody will make it, but
I don't think the Army do a particularly good job
when they're releasing people into the big wide world. It's
showing them how to get utility from their skills. Genuinely,
that's a huge miss. M.

Speaker 1 (19:31):
Yeah, so you mentioned about boxing being an exit route.
How did that? How did that work at work? Then
it allowed you to then pursue it as a no.

Speaker 3 (19:44):
So what happens if you don't. You're in battalion boxing team.
You don't have to do any army work, so you
can walk around in the tracks it all day. You
don't have to go dig in foro holes or cleaning vehicles.
You're like one of the gods, if you like, you're
one of the chosen few. Everyone's seeing the film Toy
Story where you were chosen, but the chosen ones, you know.

(20:05):
And I was good at it as well, so that
obviously made a huge difference. I was really good at it.

Speaker 1 (20:09):
So you would represent what the battalion has you mean, yeah, okay.

Speaker 3 (20:14):
And then you train all the time. You didn't have
many fights, but what you do You represent the battalion
and you train all the time. So you weren't doing
any army work, right, and just you walked around in
tracks it all day and all the army work going
on exercise, going on guard or anything like that. Was like, nah,
I don't have to do any of that.

Speaker 1 (20:31):
Lovely, Okay, I get it. Interesting. So yeah, so then
you just you were then talking about this idea even
that you went into this, you know, being a mortgage
advisor and all that sort of stuff. Now this was
the moment in time I think from what I remember,
where you began you realized that you would have to

(20:54):
develop others to have similar an understanding of influence, persuasion sales,
because you talked about sales, but I know that you're
actually really interested in influence and persuasion. So it's kind
of let's just sort of seguey into that a little
bit and then we can start to explore.

Speaker 3 (21:12):
So from my perspective, when you look at you're trying
to influence somebody to do something, whatever it is, you
need to understand the neuroscience, right, you need to understand
the brain. And so to me it was like the
art of persuasion and influence. I thought, no, no, no, I
want to know what the science is behind it. So,

(21:33):
and if you want to be successful, what you should
be able to do is you should be able to
understand exactly how things fit together. Right, how does all
of this work? Like, for example, mental pain? Like if
I ask you what's the most painful experience in your life,
it's probably the death of the loved one or something,

(21:53):
not the broken leg or the broken ankle. So mental
pain is the same as physical pain. It's exactly the
same that mental pain shows up in the same area
in your brain when you run it through a scanner,
it's there. So there's there's there's wiring inside of you,
right that makes you want to act and think and
do things. And so I was more interested in the

(22:13):
psychology that sat behind Why would people do what they do?
You know, what is it that motivates us to act
in one way rather than in another way? And so
you start studying that. And so when I was talking
to somebody, you know, and I was in as a
financial advisor or whatever, I wanted to know how do
people behave the way they behave? What is it that
makes them behave in that way? What? What?

Speaker 1 (22:35):
What?

Speaker 3 (22:35):
You know? What? Why do we as human beings behave
what we want to behave? And so I spent some
time with a guy everyone's heard of Paul McKenna, the
hypnotist right. So Paul McKenna works with a guy called
Richard Bandlet, and so they used to have a company
called McKenna Brain right and McKenna Brain have Richard Bandla
as a showpiece. What he was was he was a

(22:58):
guy that was brilliant. It was brilliant maths. And he
started studying how language works, So when you speak to somebody,
what is it that they do? And he worked with
a guy called Richard Grinder and they came up with
neuro linguistic programming. So I studied with Bandler, Grindla, McKenna
to work out what is it the max language do

(23:18):
what it does? And it became really interesting that you know,
as human beings, when we talk to people, we have
coping mechanisms. Generalization is a coping mechanism. If I say
to you, oh, yeah, our dog's here, you know what
a dog looks like, and I'm not saying it's a
big dog, little dog, you know, black, white, green, whatever,
whatever it is. I've just said it's a dog. So

(23:41):
we generalize, We distort things to make them meet our
map of the world. And then what we do is
generalization is a clear filter for us distortion, and then
we delete a lot of things, we forget everything else.
And so I was really interested in that, and so
I started studying with those guys, and then I started
studying with a guy called Robert Chow. I was one
of half a dozen people in the world, and he

(24:04):
was the guy that wrote this book Influence the Psychology
of Persuasion. So I was one of five. I was
one of a half dozen people in the world that
studied with him. What I noticed, though, was that when
you start studying all of these tiny parts, especially when
nobody's put all of the work together, it's really hard
to remember. So it's really hard to remember like Chaldean's well,

(24:26):
oh yeah, now about Childeenian reciprocity. But do you know
the science, do you know the ethics? Do you know
how to join it? When you're an linguistic programming, very
few people look into the science of it. So that
fascinated me. I found it really interesting as to you
could use the language to make people behave in a
different way, and I thought this is amazing, And so

(24:47):
that was where my love for learning came in. You know,
the human like in me, whether you're coaching, whether you're
trying to persuade, whether you're trying to influence. I just
tryed it really interesting.

Speaker 1 (25:01):
So yeah, when you mentioned Bandler, I was like immediately
went to sort of NLP, and I wasn't aware of
the roots. And I've bit like, you've been been curious
about this stuff. You know, because you get involved in coaching,
or you get involved in any form of human to
human interaction where you're guiding, shaping, supporting somebody on a

(25:25):
journey of change, you inevitably in your search for information
will come across NLP and you will come across the
work of Banguin. I didn't realize, although it makes total
sense that Paul McKenna was linked to them, because obviously
that's the sort of sort of the world they operate within,
and then linking that then to these work as well

(25:46):
around the idea of influence. These are the areas that
for me what I found really interesting about like listening
to you the first time I heard you speak, but
then subsequently since we've met this since then, is how
these are the areas that the vast much ority of
people who are practitioners, coaches, or even you know, kind
of leaders in any way where we're in the business

(26:06):
of interacting with other human being and supporting them through
some form of development of some kind. You know, if
you're a manager and company, you're a leader of a company,
you're you're a leader of a sports team, you're a
leader in any walk of life, and you're helping people
to move towards a different world do they want to

(26:27):
inhabit but are finding it difficult to get towards those things?
Then this notion of influence and you know, you've you've
you've taken it from sale, you know, but it makes
me think of like I think it's Dan Pink's book
to Sell as Human, where you know, people think of
sales as being some kind of like, you know, kind
of really cheesy, like you know, kind of very sort

(26:47):
of kind of a bit grubby maybe kind of world
where you're trying to get someone to buy something they
probably don't even need. But in reality, sales is actually
just influence. It's about, yeah, enhancing somebody or giving them
a a reason maybe to take either a product or
a service that they know is going to give them
some help or take action towards something that they're going

(27:08):
to help them in their daily lives.

Speaker 3 (27:10):
So let me give you a couple of context. So,
a couple of friends of mine who are white and
fifty and they weren't getting employed, right, weren't getting employed.
And they were familiar, and they were like, on in
a minute, why am I not getting employed? And you know,
and I help both of these guys and blokes as well,
and it's like, you know, and they've been used to

(27:32):
earning big numbers, you know, like that one fifty plus
every year, and they're like, why am I not getting employed?
I'm like, because you don't know how to and you
don't understand the psychology as to how you can frame yourself. Optimately,
you don't understand cognitive biases, you don't understand about leadership,
you can't do storytelling in a way that's conducive, you
can't bring something that's called social relevant and interesting intriguing. Ultimately,

(27:56):
you can't influence or you can't sell yourself in a
way that people look at you and go, I've never
met anybody like this before. And you've got a store
in a narrative, so you're framed optimally and they know
how to look at you. So I've got these two
guys who I worked with, and both of them went
on to get like big, big, big money, you know,
like one eighty and plus a year jobs, and they

(28:18):
were never getting those until they've gone through and had
some time with me.

Speaker 1 (28:22):
Never so as somebody who's fifty plus way and in
the marketplace that could albeit as a as an emerging consultant,
what's the secret?

Speaker 3 (28:37):
Like?

Speaker 1 (28:37):
What it would just give me a little sense not
I don't need to give everything away, but give some
things that you would work with on people that would
help them.

Speaker 3 (28:44):
So ultimately, fust show you something, right, I can show
you something well.

Speaker 1 (28:51):
Remember our podcast is also audio as well as videos.

Speaker 3 (28:53):
But I'll tell you what ultimately, Like, there's predictable responses
in whatever you do, right, there's predictable. It is bons
So if you're trying to form a relationship with somebody, right,
there's things that you can do. If you're trying to
overcome uncertainty, there's things that you can do if you're
trying to like motivate people to act as things that
you can do. So you need to know about how

(29:18):
to tell your story optimally. So one of the things
one of the guys was he didn't know how to
storytell right. And so I did a cause on storytelling
at Harvard University with Marshall Gants. And you know how
I got to it. I bowed my way onto that course,
but I got I got that. But ultimately, how do
you tell a story that makes people understand your story?

(29:39):
And you do it in moments and so Marshall Gants
is the world's best storyteller and so, and you do
it with telling people in detail, you know, like detailed,
detailed detail and moving them from a values perspective. So
I tell them, I said, okay, this is a you
tell your story, then you've got to have some secret
source in there. So most people don't understand things, and
so you need to have something that's unique about you

(30:00):
that they lose if they don't want to work with you.
So and chances are you probably don't know how to
sell you optimally right, And I do because I've spent
the last thirty odd years, so I could I could
have a session with you, teach you a few skills,
and have people banging at your door begging to work
work with you. Right, but you need to know how

(30:23):
to frame a message optimally. Like within the world of influence,
you've got pre framing, reframing, deframing, price framing. If you
don't come in with the right mindset and we know
this from our brain, right, well, you don't come in
you're thinking, oh, please pick me, right, you're not price
framing yourself in the right way. So how can you
frame whose Stuart Armstrong is optimally right? Not so optimally?

(30:46):
What's cool about you? What do people lose if they
don't work with you? How do you future pace their life? Right?
Most people want not future pacing is, but future pacing
is talking about what their life will look like without
you rather than with you. And so unless you have
these tools and these skills, you just become another one
of a statistic rather than becoming an absolute superstar that

(31:06):
stands out in the crowd. Bar mile and people. God,
you made me feel differently, and so you wire their
brain totally differently. So you know, I've got training where
I used to develop ordinary people and turn them into
stars in the sales field, but it works in any field.
And you have to understand those skills. And if you
don't get them, you don't tell me your story, you
don't know future paces. You can't frame optimally, then guess

(31:27):
what you're underutilizing The currency that is you're you're you're
a less than an optimal version of you.

Speaker 1 (31:36):
Yeah, no, I love that. So you you talked earlier
on about you talk about that you almost like you're
rewiring somebody's brain.

Speaker 3 (31:46):
Yep.

Speaker 1 (31:46):
So one of the areas that I'm really interested in
myself is this notion of ethics practice, particularly in the
world of coaching. But you mentioned earlier on that if
you I heard you say, if you don't understand the
ethics of this, then you don't really understand how you're
going to use it. So some people might, for example,

(32:07):
be recoiling a little bit because you know, when they
hear you say things like, you know, you're rewiring somebody
else's brain or influence whatever it is, they feel like
that could be you know, kind of a little bit. Matthewvellien. However,
I know you've thought through the ethics of this, but
I wonder if we could just discuss that a bit.

Speaker 3 (32:22):
Yeah, I mean two things. So just set aside, yes,
ethics for one second. When I talk about rewiring somebody's brain.
The world leader in terms of who's best that we're
wearing somebody's brain is a guy called Lannie Basham. Lanny Basham,
and he was the little factored at school that was
never going to do anything, never getting picked for the
sports teams. And Lanny says this himself. He's not me

(32:44):
saying it. It's not a judgment or an opinion. This
is Lanny's thing. And that they had the Olympics at school,
and so had the Olympics at school as a subject
they're all studying. They said, who could win a gold medal?
And kids do what kids do? You know? They pick
on the week and the people they don't. So I'll
tell you couldn't Lannie. Ha ha ha ha. Anyway, Lanny
went home because he was you know, when he was

(33:05):
playing baseball, he played outside for third base. He was
never going to be anywhere. When he was playing basketball,
he was on the bench all the time. And so
he went home to his dad and he said, Dad,
I want to win a gold medal in the Olympics.
This little kid, he was never going to do anything,
said he wanted to do that. And his dad took
him into the world of shooting, right rifle shooting, and
he said, you could do that. And he said, do
you have to be tall to be like win a

(33:27):
gold medal in the Olympics shooting? He said no, he's
in an Olympic sport and he said, yes it is.
He said, do you need to be fast? He said no.
He said, all you've got to do is be really still.
Now he'd spent his whole life out on the bench
being still. So you got this little lad, you know,
he's got his hearts that win a gold medal to
prove these people wrong. And he goes to the Olympics

(33:47):
and in nineteen seventy two in Munich, he's in the
Olympics and he's shooting in the final and he chokes
and he wins a silver medal rather than a gold medal,
and so he's like, oh my god, I'm devastating. He
wanted to do it, and it's like, this is what
it is. And so what he did was he started
studying a guy called Maxwell Maltz who wrote a book
called Psycho Cybernetics, and Maxwell Maltz was a plastic surgeon.

(34:11):
And so what Marks discovered was this self image, which
is how you see yourself. Like how you see yourself.
You can't perform outside of your own self image. So
he started studying Maxwell Marks, and he started studying all
the other gold medal winners and what he noticed was
right that all the other gold medal winners and Maxwell Maltz,
that they all had a way of rewiring your self

(34:34):
image right, a way of rewarring. So it was like, Okay,
I get it. I'll get it. I'll get it. So
how do I rewire my self image? And so he
came up with a formula from working with those gold
medal guys, and he wrote a book called With Winning
in Mind, and he went back to the Olympics in
seventy six in Montreal and he won a gold medal,
and then he created a business for it called Mental

(34:55):
Management right, where he teaches athletes how to be winners.
But it's in the mind that that winning occurs, right,
It's in the mind that the winning a curse. So anyway,
I worked with Lannie and I became one of his
certified coaches to teach people how to rewire their self image.
So if you're going in for a job and you
want to win that job, you need to know how
to make sure that it becomes like you to win

(35:18):
the job that they should give you win to win
the job, because the first place to win the battle
is in your mind. From an ethics perspective, when I
worked with Robert Chaldeini, you know he helped Obama become elected,
what he'd said was that in order to just whether
your influence attempt is ethical or unethical, he'd given it
three filters, right, three straightforward filters. So the first thing

(35:42):
is before you try and persuade somebody or influence somebody
to do something or with someone, the first question you,
she'd ask, is is what I'm about to say true?
In other words, if I put my hand on the
Bible and I'm stood there in front of the you know,
in front of the jurge, in front of the thing,
and I say, you know the truth that the influence
I'm about to give is the whole truth, hold nothing

(36:03):
but the truth. Could I say, hand on the Bible
what I'm saying is true? Also? The other thing is
natural is what you're about to say natural. You're not
trying to bring in false scarcity, You're not trying to
bring in something that's bigger than what it actually is.
And then also is it wise? Could I say what
I'm about to say to my brother and my sister

(36:23):
a family member? Could I say over and over again?
And I'd be really really cool for it if it
was on TV. They're the three filters from an ethical
perspective that I learned from from Robert CHLDEINEI that is
what I'm saying true, is it natural? And is it wise?
As long as you pass those three filters from an
ethical perspective, right, then he considers what you do to

(36:44):
be right. And you think, well, if you wouldn't do
it to your friend, you're next door neighbor, you couldn't
say it in front of the judge or in front
of everybody in the Bible, And it's not naturally. You're
not trying to kill anybody, and that's ethical. So that's
how you judge the ethics of what it is that
you're saying.

Speaker 1 (37:00):
So from the perspective of so what you're what you're
not saying though here and this is the important thing, stress.
I suppose from this, this sort of propector, if you
like being through natural and wise. Well, you're not saying
here is that you are doing anything that you wouldn't

(37:22):
and haven't already done for yourself, what you wouldn't.

Speaker 3 (37:27):
Do it for somebody else. You're not sending any lies,
you're not bringing any false scarcity. What you're doing is
you're doing it with you hand and heart their conscience.

Speaker 1 (37:36):
Mm hmmm. So it's the sort of thing that you
would do for a loved.

Speaker 3 (37:40):
One, totally next door name but best friend.

Speaker 1 (37:43):
You know, somebody undergoing some sort of challenge. You sit
there with ors you made me think, you made me
think about because I've been fortunate over the years to
have rubbed shoulders with people like yourself, but also, you know,
been curious myself and learned things about things like influence.
And I've studied sort of fairly in depth something called

(38:04):
motivational interviewing, which is sort of swimming in the same rivers.
But it's that dealing with people who have a problem,
to say, with addiction, and I've used those tools to
support family members who have gone through similar experiences. There's
a you know, there's a history of alcoholism in my family,

(38:25):
and you know, and I've done that, and I've felt
fortunate to have those skills to be able to provide
that kind of support. I believe actually, these sorts of skills, qualities, attributes,
whatever you want to call them, should be made available
to as many people in the world as possible, because

(38:45):
I've been able to help others doing that And actually,
imagine if everybody had this kind of superpower to support others,
it would be really powerful, right, it's.

Speaker 3 (38:52):
Bassive, it's absolutely massive. But what happens is we don't
teach those confidences readily. They're not readily pable.

Speaker 1 (39:01):
No, It's like I have been ranting and raving recently
about the state of coach education and how like kind
of impoverished it is, and how limited it is, and
how it really doesn't equip people for a life helping
others in a sports domain, and how we really need
to radically transform and change the way we do learning
and development in sport. And but that's partly because you know,

(39:25):
like if you if you've on your average coach education
course and you learn about you know your ex's and o's,
and you learn about technical stuff and keep your it
what you learn all this stuff once you realize the
limitations of what you've been provided in kind of basic
training with the coach at totally.

Speaker 3 (39:41):
Completely agree.

Speaker 1 (39:43):
This is a nice segue. So you moved into learning
and development, you moved into becoming a teacher because you
had to work with others to impart these skills. And
then that obviously took you into the technology space. We're
going to talk about that in a minute, but just
just taught me through that journey of this whole of learning,
supporting others on a learning journey, and the stuff that

(40:05):
you learned that you went down that route.

Speaker 3 (40:07):
So I started out as a financial advisor, and as
a financial advisor and being dyslexic, one of the things
you have to do is you have to educate people
because most people aren't they're not literate to that. And
so I would make sure that people one hundred percent
knew what I was saying, and because of that, they'd
buy from me. It was like a form of reciprocity,

(40:28):
you know, like I'd do them a favor, I'd teach
them what they needed to learn. Because of that, they'd
want to work with me, like we want to work
with you, and all of a sudden, I became the
best in the country at it, you know. But the
middle of the nineties I was doing that job. And
also I've broken everything down to the smallest component part
so that everybody knew, like the tiny little by something

(40:48):
to get that, to understand it. Does it make sense
to you? And it's like, yeah, completely, I'll get it.
And so from doing that, I built a business and
did quite well, and I sold that business. And then
when I sold the business, I went off to work
with Robert chat Any, like the world's leading social psychologists.
I wanted to do a course on influence. I thought
there should be a university where people can learn about
the science of influence and persuasion and know how to

(41:10):
do it ethically and effectively. And then I went to
work with a company. At first, I started working in
sport with fitness professionals, teaching them how to be more
influential and more persuasive, teaching them how to open a conversation,
how to frame, how to negotiate. And these were body
transformation coaches. So that was my first thing in sport,
working with body transformation coaches. And what they couldn't do

(41:31):
was persuade or influence their clients in an ethical way
to lose the weight alternatively to part with cash. Because
they didn't have that right mindset for it, they couldn't
sell the idea to the people to want to do it,
even though it was the right thing for them to do.
I'm like, you've not done a proper fact find. You've
not future paced their reality. You've not reframed the negative situation.

(41:51):
You don't understand about negotiation, predictable responses, personality styles. No
wonder you know good at this. There's so many things
you don't know. It's like teaching them. It was interesting,
and then I created. I went and bought a learning
management system, right because I thought, I want to do
this at scale. But the problem with learning management systems,

(42:11):
all learning management systems, is they focus on content delivery, right,
they focus on content creation. What they don't focus on
is learning retention, people actually spending the time. They believe
that getting the content in there is right, but it's not.
I believe retaining what you've learned the most important thing.
So when I used to train all of my people,

(42:33):
they'd have to remember it, and so I'd make them
teach back what they'd learn So my first challenge came
when I told my business I worked with a company
called the British Standards Institute. I sat on a plane
next to the COO of the British Standards Institute when
I was going snowboard in. A lady called Maureen Sumner Smith,
an amazing lady, and she invited me to come and
work in her company and teach them how to be

(42:56):
more persuasive, how to be more influential, and as a
result of doing that, sales increased by forty percent. They
flew me around the world. I started off in the UK,
and then I went off to work in Holland, and
then from Holland, I went to work in Dubai, and
I came back from Dubai, and it would go and
work in Poland, then go work in Spain, come back
and work in the UK. But what I realized was
nobody could remember right what they'd taught just from an

(43:18):
interaction on an online course. In order to embed the
knowledge they needed to learn, they needed to be able
to teach it back. And so because the technology didn't exist,
and I've made a few quid from my business from before,
I decided I'd create a learning management system whereby people
had to teach back what they'd learned. Because my time
that they'd been focused on persuasion and influence. I thought

(43:40):
i'd name it after Sueder, the goddess of persuasion, so
Suada dot com. I thought I'd call it Sweder And
I thought, people will teach back what they've learned, and
they'll do it in a social way, and they'll and
what they do is when they learn they learned to teach.
And then I thought, if they can teach it back,
they'll they'll remember it. So that was my life, I guess,

(44:01):
segue from doing the work teaching the people in the
British Standards institution. And then what I realized was there
was more in the teaching There was more in the
learning management system space because all the other platforms were garbage.
They were totally rubbish, A complete waste of time. What
a waste of time just delivering content? Our most valuable

(44:22):
commodity is time. Why wouldn't we give people time back?
We'll get them to learn from each other. And so
that was the game changer for us.

Speaker 1 (44:31):
Where did you get this notion of teach back from?
I seem to remember that it's a there's a famous
researcher that talks about teak back. Where was that? Where
have I heard that before?

Speaker 3 (44:43):
So it's called the finement technique. So the chief science
officer at Sueder is the head of cognitive neuroscience at
Caltech University's named Professor Dean Mobs. And so this is
the finement technique. So when you're trying to learn something new,
you should be eating it back. And so there's a
whole technique that sits behind it. So it came from there.

(45:05):
But actually where it came from the origin from our
perspective was I'd got this financial services business and I'd
got a big mortgage and we'd lost all our rankings
when we had this business, and I had to train
a load of new people and I had to buy
them leads. And because I had to buy them leads,
and it wasn't a few leads, you had to buy
them a lot of leads. I'd to buy them, like

(45:26):
leads were thirty pounds each and you have to buy
somebody ten leads a day, and I'd do that five
days a week. That was fifteen hundred for a week.
And then there's four and a half weeks in a month,
so it cost me seven thousand months in Leeds. I
didn't want to give leads to people that couldn't sound,
so I needed to make sure that every time I
taught them something, they taught me it back. And then
when they taught me back, I knew that they knew it,

(45:47):
and so I'd got like a peg in the ground,
if you like. So that was it. And then obviously
as you start looking and you start refining what you do,
you bring in you know, people, you know, so Dean
Mobs is a catching boy, which is where I live.
You know, we went to school together, and so he
refines our met models in our technology to make sure that,
you know, we stand up against anybody.

Speaker 1 (46:09):
So you've just introduced Clada, which is and I know
I'm saying this to you because like you know, and
you know you're you're on the podcast. But you first
showed me Towada about three years ago, four years ago,
after we'd met at the conference, and I remember distinctly
at the time, and I probably said this in our

(46:32):
call that it was a game changer, and this was
four years ago. I still think it's a game changer now.
I mean, you've had obviously lots You've got lots of
different customers in different parts of the world doing different things,
but the world of sport has still really with the
exception of maybe one organization in the training space, you know,

(46:55):
a brave trailblazer who's decided to really kind of take
it on board and it's having real great success with
its learners in the fitness space. But traditional community sport,
well so commished sports. As I've mentioned several times on
this podcast, ideas and thinking around coach education, very fewer
sports organizations have even got an LMS, never mind having

(47:18):
an LMS that actually has knowledge retention baked into its
central thinking. You know, they're in the idea of, oh,
how do I deliver content? How do I do E learning?
You know, I know lots of organizations who are just
literally dipping their toes into the idea of E learning,
you know, because up until they were forced to by COVID,
everything was done in face to face courses, which by

(47:40):
the way, were no better. It was still somebody with
a PowerPoint delivering a load of information and very little
bit actually getting retained. So the fact and then problem
with that as well, is that it's very costly, it's
very slow, it's very cumbersome, it's not that particularly that effective.
It excludes a lot of people from engagement. You can't
really do it at scale without out a huge human

(48:01):
workforce and significant cost and resourcing, and therefore the cost
go up more or less people can access, so actually
it's self defeating. So what you've got with Twada and
this is why I thought it was game changing, and
we will talk about the features in a minute, but
the fundamental principle of it, which is you know, you're
going to use platform that everybody has readily available in
their pocket as a mechanism for delivery. You're going to

(48:24):
deliver in a particular way, and you're going to then
be able to do that make it really accessible, really easy,
really available to people as and when, so you know,
you can learn on the train, you can learn where
you are, and it's actually going to demonstrate impact from
a retention and not just a retention, but also in delivery,

(48:47):
in behavior, change in action. Like that's a game changer
I think in the world of learning and development personally,
and it's certainly a game changer for sport, and it's
what we're in the business of doing so, I'd love
to just talk about how it works, etc.

Speaker 3 (49:02):
Yeah, and so for me, the biggest thing is if
you really know something, you should be able to teach it.
You should be able to teach it. You know, if
you learn to teach it lights up a different part
of your brain. And obviously we know because of you
know what professors in you know did with his neuroimaging machine.
So learning to teach is the key. And then the
other thing is it should be social. We should be

(49:24):
learning from each other. That's the best way we can learn.
So you can't be learning from each other if it's
in a classroom or on some one way broadcast mode
learning management system. And then the other thing is if
we really care about people, we genuinely care, what we
should do is make sure they can go over the
material again and again and again. When I was working

(49:46):
with Lanny Bashan and what he said was, which was
really interesting, you can't get a transformation or result from
an information or product, a book or an online course.
You need three further steps application by an expert. So
somebody that really knows the thing that you want to
learn to show you how to apply the knowledge. Confirmation

(50:08):
you're doing it right, So how do you get confirmation?
You see what other people are doing, You get coach,
you get fed back. And then also consultation, the ability
to ask a question or a series of questions and
get answers. They're the keys. So you know, for me,
when I look at your learning management systems and they're
giving you information, you can't get transformed from there. You've

(50:29):
got to have that engagement with that coach or that
tutor to take you on a journey whereby you learn
from everybody else and your teaching back what you learn
game changes it.

Speaker 1 (50:40):
It's a really interesting line reminded me of in the
world of morality and ethics. They talk about I won't
get down this rabbit hole too much, but they talk
about you can't get you can't get an instrument or
something along those lines with it. Just because something ought
to be doesn't necessarily mean it is. Is an interesting line.

(51:01):
It's very similar. You can't get transformation from information alone,
is the assumption, isn't it the information transfer? If I
impart informating into somebody else via whatever mechanism, that will
lead to transformation. The extremely there's very little evidence to
suggest that defective.

Speaker 3 (51:19):
If you put your life on it. You're saying, I
have to have my life is dependent on when you're
doing this thing, like my kids' lives, and you're thinking, well,
I want to see you doing it first. You know,
we look for social proof and everything else, and we're going,
if whatever this thing is, please show me you've done
it many other times before, and if I can see
it with my own eyes and I can see, then

(51:41):
I'm going to trust you a lot more rather than
me just broadcasting information at you. I'll do it. I'll
show you, then you show me back. Then I'll trust you.
Then I'll go and spend seven thousand on the leads,
or I'll go and see that you're right for the
interview or whatever it is that you've got to see
somebody doing it first, then you know, you go, Okay,
you've got it. You're good.

Speaker 1 (52:01):
Something that occurred to me earlier on when you were
telling the story about the creation of this was, you know,
they say that necessity is the mother of inventing, don't they.
And you had a scenario where you had, you know,
your financial future and the financial future of your family
was on the line because you were investing significant sums

(52:22):
in individuals and you couldn't afford to allow them to
sort of take that level of investment and then not
deal with it. So you fundamentally had to. You were
bought into that scenario. But what's interesting is your intuitions
led you in this direction and then you subsequently It's
like a lot of us actually by the way, our
intuitions take us in a certain direction, and then you
find actually that the science support what your intuitions are

(52:43):
telling you. Fascinating, isn't it. So let's just talk about Suada.
So it's probably worth, you know, full disclosure for the
listeners here. You know. I'm I'm I'm bought in, I'm
devote you know, I'm I'm kind of part of the

(53:03):
Suader family, so to speak. I'm now on a mission
to try and encourage as many people as possible to
explore what Zuader could possibly do for them. I think
it could be transformative for the sports space and it
could really help practicing coaches that you know two point
six million in the UK out there, you know, most

(53:25):
of whom are telling telling those who are in the
policy making space that life bloody hearts. It's a really
difficult job. They're massively under resource, they've been under resource
for years. They're asked to do much more, the expectations
are far higher. Very often they're doing it for nothing,
because they're doing it because it's a passion project, because
they're volunteers and they need support. And I think Vuader

(53:48):
is an answer, or at least part of the answer,
A big part of the answer, as to how we
can provide them with support on demand, you know, accessible available,
you know, twenty four hours a day. It gives us
this opportunity. So taught me through the kind of the

(54:09):
architecture and how it's built and what it does and
the kind of different features because there's loads and I
always forget a few whenever I'm talking to people about it,
so you know, you know it inside out, so you know,
teach you back to make sort of thing.

Speaker 3 (54:23):
Probably the biggest thing from my perspective is from a
coach perspective, it's amazing because the amount of work that
you need to do is teaching. You do a tiny
little bit of work, and then you only do work
when the learner's done something, they've learned it. So the
typical learner journey is somebody will go onto the app Store,

(54:44):
and they'll download the app Persuader app, and like you'll
have put your content onto the app, but they'll have
downloaded the app. We do a pre course assessment, a
readiness assessment, to find out what somebody's level of knowledge is.
The app that they download looks like Instagram, so imediately
everybody knows how to use it. It looks like YouTube because
it's got you YouTube in there. It's got our own

(55:05):
version of it. It looks like WhatsApps. It's got watchaps
up in there. It's got digital bandgies, micro credentials, it's
got all those things in there. People immediately know how
to use it. We've tested it in colleges, We've tested
it with loads of learners. Right, So what happens. Somebody
goes on, they download the app, they do a pre
course assessment, readiness assessment, and then they start their learning.
They're either watching videos, they're listening to audio, they're going

(55:26):
through a book, alternatively that they're going through some flash cars,
but they're doing a piece of learning. And then we
ask them to do quizzes, either video based quizzes, text
based quizzies, blash card based quizzes. And then we ask
them to teach back what they've learned to a coach.
So I'm saying, okay, you've gone through this piece of learning,

(55:47):
and let's just say you're learning about I don't know, framing,
the effect of framing and how it has on a conversation.
They've maybe watched ten little two minute videos on it,
and then we ask them to create a video no
more than five minutes, teaching back what I have learned.
So I'm now saying to you, gone, then teach me
about what you've learned. And I have a set of
assessment criteria. Right, you're going to watch You're going to
send that video to me. Now, me as a coach,

(56:09):
this is the first time I'm going to interact with you.
All I've done is put you onto the platform. I'm
going to watch your video back one and a half,
maybe twice the speed, because I know what good sounds like. Now,
when I asked you to teach back, what I mean
by that is create a PowerPoint presentation, create a Google
slides presentation, create a TikTok video, create something It shows
me that you really know this stuff that you're going
to do. If it was in sports, show me your

(56:31):
athletic move that you're going to do if it was
in football, Show me you can do that tackle or
whatever it is, but show me you can do it
in a video format. Now bear this in mind. What
you share with me is going to be shared with
everybody that's in your cohort of learners. So you're not
going to want to share with me something that's going
to make you look like a muppet. You're going to
put some effort in because you're now learning something, not

(56:52):
to learn it, but you're learning it to teach for
other people. So you're going to put more effort into
this rather than just sending it back to me. When
you send it to me, you can also send it
to peers if you're learning with them as well, to review.
And then what happens is you get feedback on what
you've done, what was good, bad, are indifferent, and then
you get a score. One to five, one to three
are try game four and five are a pass, and

(57:14):
you get notes, You get a digital badge of micro
credential that's on blockchain that says you've now passed this
part of the course, and then that video gets shared
in a news feed with everybody else. That's people can
sort through like and like and love. That's the basics
of the platform. In there, We've also got an AI
coach that you can talk to like chat GPT, and

(57:35):
you can talk to it and it will coach you
if ever you get stuck. You can also click and
talk to any of your peers. You can message any
peer that's learning the same thing that you're learning. So
social learning, mobile friendly platform, and then we've got desktop
that does all other sorts of things as well.

Speaker 1 (57:55):
And so for me, I think there's some peakers that
just want to pull out from what you could there
that I think are really powerful. Yeah. I think that
one of the things is like so tradictionally again, right,
so I still think this happens now by the way
you're doing it. If you're doing your level two or
level three coaching, you know, it might take you whatever

(58:15):
length of time you've got to go to various physical sessions.
Not saying you would necessarily not do that under using FUADA,
But the thing about it is you have to gather
this portfolio of evidence. It's usually a file full of paper, yeah,
and it's usually done where you've got like some sort
of reflective journal or whatever it is, and it's written
or it's tight or whatever it might be. But it's

(58:36):
all a physical document in paper, right, which is like
crazy in this day, in this day and age of digital,
your evidence portfolio and your digital badging and micro credentialing
approach means that someone's going on this sort of what
they call asyncreous asynchronous learning journey or a you know,
a kind of a nonlinear learning journey, and they are

(58:57):
gaining knowledge as they go, and they are micking their
knowledge the knowledge that they're gaining through a mechanism like
yes you can do audio, Yes you can do video,
Yes you can do written if need be. But more
often than not, like you say, it's some form of
a teach to peer this is what i've learned about
this that can be peer reviewed, and it can be

(59:19):
reviewed by your learning coach, your assessor, or whoever it
is that's going to be providing you with that and
mapped against whatever criteria that's been mapped. And then as
you're going through that learning journey asynchronously and moving through
that learning journey, you can be allocated these digital badges
to show recognition of the learning that you've obteen obtained.
So basically this notion of continuous professional development, that's actually

(59:45):
how you gain recognition of expertise. It's not the idea
of I've done a qualification, now I'm going to do
my continuous preessonal development. You're basically doing continuous professional development
as the mechanism to gain recognition of your expertise, and
that is a huge game changer.

Speaker 3 (01:00:01):
Yeah. So, I mean, what we've built in where you
have a big far We've built an ebook reader into
the platform with digital workbooks, so they're all built into
the platform, so all your learning is in one place,
so anybody can come along and inspect your portfolio. We
do it with a coach, so when we do all
our learning, so you've got a virtual coach and somebody
will coach you through your learning so you still you

(01:00:22):
don't lose any of the component parts that you've done before.
And we do long courses as well well, Like we
do level two, we do level three. We've just released
I mean, you know, we work with the YMCA Awards.
We've just done a menopause course for those guys. We
do the level two level three in you know, if
they're becoming a PT or a give instructor, but it's

(01:00:43):
all online and it's engaging, and you get to talk
to an actual person as you go through, and it's
game fight, so it makes it a bit more fun.
But also where it can be a teach back video
as opposed to writing a four hundred word essay or
that four thousand word essay. It's and then show me
you can do this, show me you can do that,

(01:01:03):
which just makes it easier. And people are used to
today like creating a little video and teaching back, and
they're used to doing that. TikTok videos and youtubes and
cameras are used in everybody's phone, so we take advantage
of the mobile phone. We've got desktop as well, but
we take advantage of the mobile phone and its features,
and so we're mobile first. AI supported learn Learn the

(01:01:26):
centric coaching platform that focuses on making sure people can
remember what they've learned, they learned from each other, everybody else.

Speaker 1 (01:01:35):
Yeah, and so for example, I'm just going to sort
of explore I'm going to talk about some of the
uskated from like my world in coke poke development, that
kind of thing, you know. I I we're talking to
other day actually too. The other day with a year
ago or though too, like one of the heads sort
of development at one of the big big universities, in fact,

(01:02:00):
the Open University. So you know we have over here
the Open University created by the government, the University in
the sky. It's referred to as you know, so it's
the idea of distance learning. They use all the stuff
from the BBC to use the the put it from
the BBC to create like massive online learning courses. And
he was saying to me, I want to create it.
It's talking to me about creating a kind of a

(01:02:21):
master's course, a master's level cour in fokes development. And
I said, yeah, yeah, yeah, because you know, obviously it
needs to be wrapped around work based learning, you know,
so it needs to be practicing folks, developers being able
to sort of track their learning journey. And I said, well, okay,
Well what you need then is, you know, like I'll
be out doing a session with some coaches and I'll

(01:02:42):
be driving home, you know, be late at night, driving home.
I need to be able to record my reflection immediately
on the way home in the car because that's like, firstly,
that's dead time. Secondly, I'm not going to get home
and start writing everything down and then by the next
day I've forgotten most of what I've actually taken notes off.
So therefore, if I can live reflect, capture live reflection
and to audio as I'm driving home, that'd be really useful.

(01:03:03):
Can I put that? Could I put that into like
a portfolio of learning? And he said, well, no, it
doesn't really work like that in academic academia, and I
was like, right, well, forget it then don't bother. But
with SUEDA, that's exactly what you do. You know, So
you record your audio and you're driving home, you upload
it into the app and then boom, You've got your
kind of reflective log that then immediately then goes into

(01:03:25):
your peer cohort and they can listen to it as well.

Speaker 3 (01:03:27):
Yeah, and everybody learns from everybody else, and so ultimately
it should be social and when you're learning to teach,
you're not a load of dribble on there. You can
say this is what I've taken to hear, what's great,
here's my questions, and everybody chips in and helps each other.
So it just works. And like the reason it works.
Back in the day when I was working with the
financial advisors, was because when you're learning to teach, it's

(01:03:50):
different to learning for self. It lights up a different
part of your brain. So what we're really asking people
to learn something and then teach you back, and you
have to give it a different level of thought.

Speaker 1 (01:04:02):
Yeah, that's the same. The other bit I think is
really powerful is this idea of the pre assessment. This
is something that's never done, something is nobody knows anything.
Everybody has to go into this kind of like sattage
factory where they regardless of what other previous experiences they've
had or knowledge they've already gleaned, everybody's starting from the
same position, Which is nonsense, isn't it, Because, like, you know,

(01:04:22):
if you've got someone who's really experienced coach, just because
I don't happen to know anything about say boxing or
martial arts, doesn't necessarily mean I haven't got any coaching skills.
So actually having done your you know, and what two
thirds of the way through your influence course, at the
moment you know, doing the pre assessment, I was actually, oh,
I actually know a bit about this. I didn't. I
didn't know nothing, you know, And so but I also recognized, oh,

(01:04:43):
there's some big gaps in my knowledge. Right here we go,
we're going to delve in.

Speaker 3 (01:04:47):
So one of the reasons for that, and I learned
this from Robert Chardini, is like start people where they're strong,
where they're weak. So if where do you want to start?
May you really good? You're really good at this? Do
you want to get people addicted? You know, you want
to get people addicted something where they already know something.
Not well, you don't know anything about this. Let's start
over here. That's like pushing water up hill. You want

(01:05:08):
to start where people are strong. Love looked at the group,
this is where the route's really strong, because then they
feel good about it, they feel good about working with you.
So doing a pre assessment, working out where people are strong,
you can go faster. People know it more. I know
that everybody knows, and you take everybody with you. But
starting strong is one of the big things there.

Speaker 1 (01:05:28):
From a micro credentialing perspective, digital badging, whatever you want
to call it, it's not inconceivable, is it that somebody
could do a pre assessment and actually be given micro
credentials based on their knowledge to say, you already have
knowledge of this, this and this. The only other things
you now need to do with these are needs. So
actually their learning journey could be actually a little bit
quicker than someone else.

Speaker 3 (01:05:49):
And you can abtabed with learning journeys depending on what
you want to do. You know, ultimately it's depending what
you want to do. One of the scripts though with
some of the learning management systems is they'll ask two
quick questions about a topic or a subject that somebody
can guess, right, they can guess. Now, you've got to
be thorough. So you've got to be prepared for a
big pre course assessment before you start disqualifying content. And

(01:06:13):
I can tell you one of the big learning management systems, Oh,
you don't have to do this two thirds. I'm like,
if your life depended on it, right, and you were
going to go out to battle and you're going to
have to spend a load of money on this person,
I guarantee your pre curst assessment would be much more
thorough than what it would be rather than asking a
couple of questions. And so again that's why I see
people focus on they say, well, let's try and shorten

(01:06:34):
the journey. You're making a bad shortcut because that shortcut
there is not well considered and you wouldn't go down
that road because you don't know at leads.

Speaker 1 (01:06:42):
Funny, you know you talk about that you made me
smile because I've recently been a course to become a
pickle in the thought I'm involved in, and you have
to do a cat how well do you know the
rule and the amount of question that were true or pole?
And of course if you get it wrong, you can

(01:07:03):
go back and then redo the question. So if you
just went fifty to fifty guests, yes, I'm right, Oh great.
If I'm not right, just go back in and say
the other one and you're in. Like, they're not really
a very good learning model, and these are people who
are responsible for running game.

Speaker 3 (01:07:20):
From asking you to teach me about what you've learned,
then I know that you know that you know it.

Speaker 1 (01:07:26):
Oh god, it's interesting. And the benefit of that, of course, though,
is that before you go through the process of teaching back,
you're probably already learning stuff that your cohorts put in,
so like you can I mean, of course if you're not,
if you don't put anything in, you're not going to
be able to move forward. To the beauty of this,
of course, is because you're learning from others because they're

(01:07:48):
teaching back. Everybody's learning from each other, and you're learning
from everybody's different perspectives and the way that they're taking
in the information and responding. And that's like actually as
a as a reinforcement mechanism, as a powerful and also
as a motivational tool to help people continuously want to
contribute something like you know, someone does a really good presentation,
like you want to do something better, right, So of

(01:08:08):
course that natural naturally competitive element.

Speaker 3 (01:08:12):
One of the best things about it is it acts
as a talent finder. Wow, okay, so you know often
in an organization. We were talking to one of the
big Swedish letical manufacturers this week about blue collar workers
and the need for a learning management system where you
can they can learn on the go on their device,
and it was like, yeah, and now what we do

(01:08:34):
is we make every teach back. And we explained that
this is a talent finder and what she said was,
this is amazing, John, you know, this is amazing, This
is exactly what we need. Why weren't you at least
last week while we weren't. But anyway, but that talent
finder thing is a massive thing because when somebody's teaching
back something and you can use that talent that you

(01:08:56):
found to be a reusable knowledge object. So I remember
when I worked the BSI and there was a guy there,
young lad called Ben, and Ben you know like it
culturally he didn't quite fit the culture, but I didn't
quite fit. But when you started watching him teach back,
it was obviously why I didn't fit. It was in
the wrong job. He should have been leading, and he
was doing a job. He was doing a sales job.
So they moved him into a job where he started

(01:09:17):
leading people because his teach back videos were that good
and it was obviously he was going to be a
great leader. And he's still there now to this day,
you know. And so it was about making sure that
you get the right square peg and square hole round
peg in the round hole. And so it acted as
a talent finder. So where's the talent And if you
can see it on a device and sit skip through
the message it and talk to it, it's massive. That's

(01:09:39):
really powerful.

Speaker 1 (01:09:41):
I also like the fact that you know, from my perspective,
you know, I'm busy. I mean amount of like courses
that I've wanted to do or had to do because
it's a compliance requirement for you know, to maintain your
data to whatever it is, and you have to look
log into the platform and you have to get to
the content, you know, and you know, even in my world,

(01:10:03):
I'm involved with loads of different sports experiences, right, and
they've all got their own platforms and they're all hidden
away and you have to log into them and you
have to remember to and this, that and the other.
You don't necessarily get notifications that's something in there, and
it's not it's not usually any way content that's even
that relevant. It's kind of idealized content, you know, kind
of generic. Whereas so for me a the learning is social,

(01:10:24):
so you're part of a community that are learning together
and you contributing, commenting, liking, sharing, providing feedback on somebody
else's content. Is a form of reath of property. But
it's although powerful because it's you know, it's a huge
motivator and a driver. Then the other aspect is that

(01:10:44):
you're you're doing it when you can, like, not when
you have to. So I don't have to find the
time to sit at my desk and open my laptop
and do this, that and the other. You know, Like
I said, I can be waiting for a train. Oh,
I've got you know, a spare ten minutes, right, I'm
just going to go and do that quick module now,
Oh yeah. Or I'm going to like and share on that.
Oh that's a really nice piece that's just been shared
by Jenny. I'm going to share that to someone else,

(01:11:06):
or you know, I'm going to take a bit of
that and put a comment on it because I think, Oh,
I've got a link related to that under the video.
I'm going to upload that. I'm going to link that
video because that's relevant to what she was doing and
that will help with her learning. That's the just I mean,
And it becomes a hugely powerful way of driving learning
and engagement.

Speaker 3 (01:11:23):
If you think about today, and we did this thing
with Colin Cambri and the kids were spending ten hours
on their phone. So you meet them where they're at,
put the learning on the phone. Ten hours on the
phone on a daily basis, So you see people glued
to these phones, and you think, meet people where they're at.
Make the learning like TikTok, like YouTube, make it by

(01:11:47):
its size, put flashcars, quiz questions, make it social. Then
all of a sudden, you've got a chance if you
start trying to do desktop first or trying to shoehorn
a desktop experience into a mobile platform, doesn't work. It
doesn't work.

Speaker 1 (01:12:04):
I love it. I love it. I could talk, I
could talk forever, but I'm conscious that I want to
be able to sort of allow people to want to
find out more rather than tell them everything. So it's
got enormous potential. It's probably worth mentioning as well that
Rader is now officially becoming a channel partner of the

(01:12:26):
Talent Equation podcast. So I will be doing or you
might hear like segments of this conversation that could that
go on would have put us a sort of pre roll,
and I will be kind of promoting the fact that
Vader exists. It's because I mean a lot of that
is due to and I've been very very reluctant. Not reluctant,

(01:12:47):
that's not not true. I haven't taken on channel partners.
I've had offers from lots of lots of different people
over various different over the years, of people wanting to
be sponsors and channel partners of the podcast, and I
haven't taken them up. Taken them up because I either
didn't fully believe in the product or it wasn't quite
the right fit for the philosophy of what I'm trying

(01:13:10):
to do here with this particular go but Sueder definitely is.
So you are officially, you know, you're fifically the third
channel partner for the Talent Equation podcast, which I'm very
excited about. And I know obviously you're you know, you've
got you know, you're going to be going This podcast
will probably come out at a similar time that you're
relaunching the website, So people are going to be able

(01:13:31):
to find out more. What is the best way for
them to find out more, well, you know, what are
the various kind of handles that they need to go on.

Speaker 3 (01:13:39):
Yeah, so, I mean you can find Sueder at Sweder
dot com, s U A d A dot com, or
you can go to my LinkedIn David Thompson T H
O M S O N and then just put Sueder
s U A d A and you'll find me on
LinkedIn and you know, or drop me a note David
at Sweder dot com if you want to speak to me,

(01:13:59):
happy to do a demo. Shase from the stuff that
we're doing and some of the people we're working with
you know, it's it's really exciting we launch very soon
on you site, which would be amazing and that you know,
that takes you through some of the stuff that we've
got on swade It. But yeah, it's pretty cool and
you know, the technology works awesome.

Speaker 1 (01:14:20):
Yeah. I mean one of the things that's probably also
worth mentioning is, you know, if people are interested and
then then you know, and obviously they know they know
me is to it is to root them through me
as well, because I'll be able to help help them
tape a little bit of the thinking about what it
is their use cases and this, that and the other,
and then you know, rather than bombarding you, they're going
to come through me, and then I'll I'll get them
to you, you know, and then we'll we'll set up

(01:14:41):
the kind of demo and all that sort of stuff.
I can do quite a bit of that as well,
because obviously I'm obviously you know, kind of associated, and
you know, we can really help shape how they might
want to use the platform for them, because there's various
different ways you can do it, either as an individual
or as a as an organization, and you know, it
kind of looks in various different ways.

Speaker 3 (01:15:01):
That's the perfect way. So coming through you, Stuart, I
think that's the perfect way. I mean, you've obviously got
my number, you can speak to me and we can
set things up. So coming through Stuart. Yeah, absolutely, that's
the best way forward.

Speaker 1 (01:15:13):
Listen and David appreciated time. I'm really excited about this, Tarnique.
I'm really looking forward to genuinely, like you know, I mean,
I want to see player everywhere I want I want
I want Coke to be able to access learning more readily.
I want them to access the support they need. I
know they don't get it. I don't get it, So
I know, and I think you're a big part of
the future of learning and development in sport and digital activity.

(01:15:35):
So yeah, this is an exciting time. And really appreciate
you coming on to talk to me about it.

Speaker 3 (01:15:40):
Thank you. We're up for an award this month for
the Innovation of the Year this association of awarding bodies.
I think that's it's either this week or next week,
so hopefully we win that award as well. So yeah,
Suader's doing all right.

Speaker 1 (01:15:52):
I love the fact that they're calling that they called
the innovation of the year, Like you're like you know
you're like you've only been around in the last year,
like you've been out here for five years, because people
finally waking up to it.

Speaker 3 (01:16:01):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:16:02):
Absolutely absolutely, but nonetheless nice to get accolades, isn't it.

Speaker 3 (01:16:06):
Absolutely It's always nice to be recognize people saying nice
things about you.

Speaker 1 (01:16:09):
We delighted, Okay, David, I really appreciate you coming on
and look forward to being the big launch in datacome.

Speaker 3 (01:16:18):
Thank you, sir, and look forward to it.

Speaker 2 (01:16:24):
Thanks for listening to the Talent Equation podcast. If you
like the show, then please consider supporting it by leaving
a review on your favorite podcast player, telling your friends
about it, or even becoming a hero and show your
appreciation by becoming a patron. Just head over to the
Talent Equation dot co dot uk and click on the
becoming a Patron buddy at the top of the page.

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"You can't get transformation just from information" - a conversation with David Thomson

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}"You can't get transformation just from information" - a conversation with David Thomson