Holly Keily, Ph.D. is Research and Analysis Department Manager at Toastmasters International. In this episode, Holly talks about growing up in Denver, family, childhood interests, french language, international business, communications, Hawaii, Milwaukee, Buffalo, career, and Toastmasters.
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[00:00:33] Welcome to the Koniverse.
[00:00:35] This is Matt McQueenie and I'm so pleased to be joined by Holly, who right now is from Toastmasters,
[00:00:41] but has a great and varied history beyond that.
[00:00:45] Holly, welcome to the show.
[00:00:47] Thank you.
[00:00:48] Thanks, Matt.
[00:00:48] Thanks for making time.
[00:00:50] Of course.
[00:00:50] And inviting me.
[00:00:51] Absolutely.
[00:00:51] So, Holly, we like to go all the way back to where it started and say, where were you born?
[00:00:57] Where'd you grow up?
[00:00:58] I am actually from Denver, Colorado, which is statistically unusual.
[00:01:03] I was born in Denver.
[00:01:05] I grew up here.
[00:01:05] And then I went to undergrad at the University of Denver, right?
[00:01:09] Not very far from where I grew up.
[00:01:12] So that seems to be an inside Colorado joke.
[00:01:14] Why is it statistically not as common?
[00:01:18] It is one of those places where we've had a lot of population growth over the last few decades.
[00:01:26] And most of the people you meet in Denver are not from Colorado.
[00:01:30] So it's always very exciting when I'm in a group of people and there's another person actually from Colorado.
[00:01:39] It's like a unicorn was spotted.
[00:01:42] We get very excited about it.
[00:01:44] But it is one of those places that's very transient.
[00:01:47] It's beautiful here.
[00:01:47] We got really good weather most of the year round.
[00:01:50] There's tons of outside stuff.
[00:01:51] So it's really attractive.
[00:01:53] I love it.
[00:01:54] And I moved back.
[00:01:55] And so we also get a ton of people coming in from all over the place.
[00:01:59] It's really fun.
[00:02:00] So the thing that's even more interesting than growing up in a place like that is, what did your parents do?
[00:02:05] How did they come to a place like that?
[00:02:09] Yeah.
[00:02:09] My mom is actually from New York State and my dad's from New Jersey.
[00:02:12] They met in Rhode Island and then they moved to Pittsburgh.
[00:02:17] And my mom at one point got flown out to Arizona to Phoenix for a job interview.
[00:02:23] And she said that they opened the curtains every day.
[00:02:25] They were there for a week every day and couldn't believe it was still sunny and immediately knew they had to move to Arizona.
[00:02:33] They'd never seen that much sun.
[00:02:35] So they went back to Pittsburgh and basically packed up their life and moved out west.
[00:02:40] And then after living in Phoenix for a couple of years, I think, they moved up to Denver.
[00:02:45] Slightly more agreeable climate, especially in the summertime.
[00:02:49] Oh, that's funny.
[00:02:50] I'm from New Jersey and live here now.
[00:02:52] And when I finished college, I went to Phoenix.
[00:02:56] And I had the same.
[00:02:57] I was shocked.
[00:02:58] But it is amazing the way the body habituates to where you are to the point where even when I was living there for four months,
[00:03:07] the heat or the feeling that you were cold, it somehow goes away.
[00:03:14] Like you live in New Jersey and it can get to negative.
[00:03:16] And then you're there and it's like, ooh, we've got to put some long clothes on.
[00:03:20] It's like 57.
[00:03:21] This is strange how that happens.
[00:03:23] It's chilly 60.
[00:03:24] What am I doing?
[00:03:25] Yeah.
[00:03:26] So, yeah, no, that's really interesting with going out west for that reason.
[00:03:32] So, do you have siblings?
[00:03:35] I have a younger brother.
[00:03:37] Oh, nice.
[00:03:38] So, just the one.
[00:03:39] Cool.
[00:03:39] So, what is it like growing up in a place like Colorado?
[00:03:44] You said south of Denver pretty much the whole time?
[00:03:50] We were a little, I grew up a little closer to the city.
[00:03:53] So, we were like 10 minutes from the city.
[00:03:59] And my parents are very outdoorsy.
[00:04:01] So, we got to take full advantage of everything that the state has to offer.
[00:04:06] We would go camping in the summer.
[00:04:08] My dad was on a softball team that became like our extended family.
[00:04:12] So, we'd go to all these softball games.
[00:04:14] There was like a gaggle of kids all over running around,
[00:04:17] going to climbing trees while people were trying to play softball
[00:04:21] and also keep us from falling catastrophically out of the trees.
[00:04:26] My father for a long time worked for a ski company called Volant Skis.
[00:04:32] And he was also, he was a ski patrolman at a, like a backcountry place.
[00:04:37] So, he did cross-country ski patrolling.
[00:04:39] So, we grew up skiing.
[00:04:41] I think I had my first pair of skis when I was two.
[00:04:44] They were yellow.
[00:04:46] I remember them.
[00:04:48] And going on ski trips where you kind of ski up into the mountains to a hut or cabin
[00:04:54] and stay there over a couple of days and then ski back out.
[00:04:59] We got to do all of that stuff.
[00:05:02] It was really, really wonderful.
[00:05:03] It was very outside.
[00:05:04] And that was one of the things when I moved away that I really missed was
[00:05:07] going out into the national forest and seeing the sky and the sunshine, admittedly.
[00:05:13] But all those outdoor things that we can do basically year-round here.
[00:05:19] There's something in every season.
[00:05:21] Yeah.
[00:05:22] Just go outside, have fun.
[00:05:24] And sometimes it can be 60 one day and then, you know, crazy amounts of snow the next, right?
[00:05:30] You can have every season in three days' time.
[00:05:34] It will change drastically, dramatically.
[00:05:37] And then it changes again.
[00:05:38] So, it's not that bad.
[00:05:40] It's not that long.
[00:05:41] I'm a big sports fan.
[00:05:42] And, of course, everyone always hears Coors Field.
[00:05:46] The balls go out crazy.
[00:05:48] Was the softball team a prolific home run group?
[00:05:51] They were good.
[00:05:53] I remember a number of very large trophies.
[00:05:56] I was quite small, so I don't know if they'd be large today in my full height.
[00:06:00] But they were very large when we were little kids that the softball team won.
[00:06:06] I remember a lot of parties for a softball team.
[00:06:09] So, I'm not entirely sure.
[00:06:12] I wasn't quite aware of whether they were full-on victory parties or just a party to have a party.
[00:06:17] But it was definitely a good way to spend a lot of the summer with a bunch of friends.
[00:06:23] Sounds like a lot of fun.
[00:06:24] So, you are currently a PhD.
[00:06:28] How important was education growing up?
[00:06:31] You have this probably this dichotomy between all this outdoorsy stuff.
[00:06:35] But then you're going to school.
[00:06:36] There must have been a real focus on schooling for you to follow through all the way as an adult to those levels.
[00:06:44] Yeah.
[00:06:44] I think for me growing up, a lot of it was focused on what do you think is interesting and go do that and see what is kind of neat.
[00:06:53] What kind of find your folly and follow it to go heavy on the alliteration.
[00:06:58] But my mother has, I think, two master's degrees and undergrad and she kind of meandered through.
[00:07:05] So, she's a petroleum geologist and then she got a master's degree in technical writing and that ended up being a big part of her career was as an editor.
[00:07:16] Which is not something that she was specifically trained to do.
[00:07:20] It was just something that she really liked geology.
[00:07:23] She took a geology class as an elective in college and then decided it was so interesting.
[00:07:30] Rocks are cool.
[00:07:31] My mom loves to say kids love rocks.
[00:07:33] It's true.
[00:07:35] And so, she just transferred to a different school where that was something that they offered full time and it ended up working out.
[00:07:43] So, that was a lot of us.
[00:07:45] My brother and I growing up was figure out the thing that you think is interesting and do that thing.
[00:07:51] And if it is down an education path, then go that way as far as you think is interesting and worth it.
[00:08:00] And then do another thing.
[00:08:02] Find something else.
[00:08:04] And so, what were those things for you and do you find that there's a connection from when you were young till, not that you're not young anymore, but you know, when you're a young person until we're an adult?
[00:08:16] Yeah.
[00:08:17] Yeah.
[00:08:17] I took a, I was enrolled in a French class when I was in elementary school.
[00:08:23] It was kind of like an add-on.
[00:08:25] I think it was before school class that I'd go to a couple times a week.
[00:08:29] And then my parents were friends with a bunch of people who were language teachers.
[00:08:33] They taught Spanish and English and English as a second language and French.
[00:08:38] And between the whole lot of them, I was encouraged to take French when I was in middle school and continue on with it because I had that basis from when I was very in young elementary school, primary school.
[00:08:52] And so, I went all the way through middle school and high school taking French.
[00:08:57] When I got to college, I was talking to one of the professors at the University of Denver.
[00:09:03] He was a French professor and I said, I want to major in French.
[00:09:05] And he goes, oh, don't do that.
[00:09:07] Major in something you can get a job in and do French for fun.
[00:09:10] French should be fun.
[00:09:11] And I was like, oh, I'll do that.
[00:09:14] So, I ended up getting a degree in international business.
[00:09:19] And as part of that, I was able to spend a year in France.
[00:09:23] So, I lived kind of in South Central France.
[00:09:26] And I had enough French credits that I got a second degree while I was at DU in French with a minor in economics because I had taken a bunch of economics classes in French.
[00:09:38] Because why not?
[00:09:39] They have an economy.
[00:09:41] And they have Thomas Piketty.
[00:09:42] They have Thomas Piketty, right?
[00:09:44] Yeah.
[00:09:45] Yeah, absolutely.
[00:09:46] So, to me, a lot of it was this is the thing that's interesting.
[00:09:51] And then in international business with a lot of those classes and then with a number of internships that I had, I just really got interested and motivated by communication.
[00:10:03] How do people talk to each other?
[00:10:05] And how am I able to best form my message to you so that you have the highest probability of understanding what it is I'm trying to put into your brain?
[00:10:18] So, that you have the highest probability of doing the thing that I want you to do or understanding what it is I'm trying to tell you.
[00:10:25] Like, what are the tools that I can use as a speaker to kind of design that and give us the best chance of success without having to go back and reiterate and redo the same conversation four, five, seven times?
[00:10:40] It's funny because an international business degree was probably the best commercial use of a love of a different language, right?
[00:10:50] Because of that very aspect.
[00:10:54] You know, there's local ways of doing things and, you know, cultural norms and wherever you go.
[00:11:01] But I guess if that can be your pilot into that world, it helps maybe be a microcosm to teach in all the other places, kind of.
[00:11:10] Yeah, absolutely.
[00:11:11] It was great.
[00:11:12] We had a bunch of different case studies.
[00:11:15] We had a bunch of professors that came in and speakers that came in with all different experiences from different types of industries to different cultures, different parts of the world.
[00:11:25] It was really fascinating.
[00:11:27] And so, you got a really broad, even though it was mostly in Denver, except for the year I was in France.
[00:11:32] And then I did do an extension in Austria, which was very interesting.
[00:11:39] But except for that, we were primarily in Denver, which is in the middle of the United States.
[00:11:44] It is not close to stuff, really.
[00:11:49] But we still were able to get a lot of that international peace in the course of education.
[00:11:57] Yeah, but there's probably an advantage in some ways to learning it there.
[00:12:05] Because it's almost more of a – I don't want to call it a blank canvas, but there's not a ridiculous amount of melting pot there.
[00:12:13] And I mean, it's not like you did the other way, too.
[00:12:19] But what were some of the things that really stuck out to you even to this day about international business?
[00:12:27] I think a lot of what I found really interesting about it was that cross-cultural communication.
[00:12:34] How do you take a business idea from environment A and go into environment B, which has completely different cultural norms, totally different expectations, different communication standards, different politeness expectations, different just basic communication?
[00:12:53] How do you form an email in a different culture can be vastly different from where you're coming from?
[00:13:01] And going in and being able to transmute your information and not just directly transliterate it where you're replacing one word for another,
[00:13:13] but recraft the message without it bogging down everything and taking you three years or whatever to get the email sent.
[00:13:22] Do you find that – you hear a lot about, well, you can speak to someone, you can email them.
[00:13:29] How do they – even in one language, right?
[00:13:31] How do they accept what you're trying to say to them?
[00:13:35] Do they understand it in the written word versus how it's said in person versus video?
[00:13:39] Do you think that there's any advantages to the learning you did internationally,
[00:13:44] the language stuff that even helps being in the same language and those different modes of communication?
[00:13:49] I think so.
[00:13:51] I think anyone who has experience with dealing in, especially in two different languages,
[00:13:57] going from language A to language B, for example, you have to be really intentional about things like tense,
[00:14:06] about what's in your common ground.
[00:14:08] What can I expect that you're going to understand?
[00:14:11] And what do I need to go out of my way to define so that we can establish a shared understanding
[00:14:18] before we move on to whatever it is we're trying to do?
[00:14:22] I think that that's something that you get passively when you work in a single language,
[00:14:30] when you have different registers.
[00:14:31] So, you speak differently to your boss than you do to your child.
[00:14:36] Those are two examples of register variation in a single language.
[00:14:41] But it's way more explicit and it's very obvious when you're trying to do it in a different language,
[00:14:46] especially if that language has things like more tense or grammatical gender
[00:14:52] or just really obvious different politeness structures.
[00:14:56] These are things that you have to be or you become really, really conscious of
[00:15:01] when you do a lot of that kind of translation on the fly in the different languages.
[00:15:09] So, I think that you would definitely get that still within a single language.
[00:15:15] So, for example, if you as an English speaker moved from Kansas to London,
[00:15:21] you would clearly notice the accent.
[00:15:23] But you would also pick up on a lot of these cultural differences.
[00:15:27] It is just less obvious because we are technically speaking the same language.
[00:15:32] So, we don't have these big grammatical syntactic shifts that you have when you go
[00:15:38] from English to French or to German or to Japanese, for example.
[00:15:44] Yeah.
[00:15:46] I studied French, not to the levels you did, but up through high school.
[00:15:52] And I found because I was learning French a little later in my young adulthood,
[00:15:58] it actually taught me English again, right?
[00:16:02] Because you might have not been ready to learn some of those things at the time you did
[00:16:06] and you pick them up just because you lived it.
[00:16:08] And I would often have aha moments when learning French as a young adult about English.
[00:16:15] Did you find something similar?
[00:16:17] Oh, absolutely.
[00:16:18] And you'll get that especially with English because there's such a heavy French influence
[00:16:22] from the Norman conquest.
[00:16:25] They spoke French and had a huge influence on the language pretty late in development
[00:16:31] if you look at like a big time frame.
[00:16:34] When you take any other language that's had a big kind of an outsized impact on English,
[00:16:38] so, if you take German, you'll notice different things about English that we get from that Germanic.
[00:16:45] The very, very early roots of English are Germanic.
[00:16:48] So, you'll notice things or you'll kind of realize, oh, that's why we do this, that, or the other thing.
[00:16:55] That's why we have these certain verbs that don't really make sense the way that we make them past tense
[00:17:02] or present tense.
[00:17:03] And with French, it's a lot more modern.
[00:17:07] So, it was something that, okay, so I taught the history of English.
[00:17:13] The Norman conquest started, it happened in 1066 with William the Conqueror, who came over.
[00:17:19] And he was from Normandy.
[00:17:22] Normandy is France.
[00:17:25] They were, before that, they were Vikings.
[00:17:28] But at that point, they spoke basically kind of an old version of French.
[00:17:32] And they came in and became the ruling class for the English.
[00:17:36] And then we see that's really fascinating with just lexical items, not even these syntax things
[00:17:43] that are a little trickier, is that you have these French-derived words that ended up being associated
[00:17:49] with things that were more refined.
[00:17:51] And the English-derived words kind of stayed at that lower class because that's who those people were.
[00:17:57] The English were the lower class.
[00:17:59] So, they were the people raising cows and pigs.
[00:18:03] And then the Normans were the ruling class, and they were the ones eating beef and pork,
[00:18:09] which beef and pork come from the French, and cows and pigs come from the English.
[00:18:13] Oh, very interesting.
[00:18:17] How impactful was the year living in France at that point in your life?
[00:18:22] That was really interesting.
[00:18:23] I lived in a town called Avignon, which is south central.
[00:18:29] It's where the popes moved when there was the Black Plague.
[00:18:31] So, it's really pretty.
[00:18:34] It's not – it's a decent kind of mid-sized city, maybe.
[00:18:40] What was really fascinating is it allowed me to take a bunch of classes that I don't think I would have done
[00:18:48] if I had stayed in the States or stayed in English.
[00:18:55] Because I was treating them basically all as this kind of fun experience, this fun one-time-only,
[00:19:03] just learn and figure out what's interesting opportunities.
[00:19:09] So, I was able to take things like architecture and art history and like a really intricate class on French cinema
[00:19:19] that were all completely unrelated.
[00:19:23] And if we were looking at just checking off the boxes,
[00:19:27] they were total sidetracks for me actually completing that international business degree.
[00:19:32] But they were so interesting and it was a really cool way to get into French culture
[00:19:40] more than I would have done if I had just stayed in those business classes
[00:19:46] because they were about the – like the texture of the environment that I was living in.
[00:19:54] So, we also got to – with a lot of those classes, especially the art history and architecture class,
[00:20:00] or two classes, we got to go around to see these examples of whatever it was we were learning about.
[00:20:08] So, I had taken some of these kind of in high school, an art history class,
[00:20:12] and you learn about art and you look at pictures of it and it's like, yeah, that's pretty.
[00:20:19] But then when I was in France, you studied the same pieces and then went on up to Paris and got to actually see them.
[00:20:30] And they're way more intricate and breathtaking.
[00:20:33] And there's a lot more to the masterwork than I think comes across even in the best renditions on paper
[00:20:42] or digitally now, I guess, that you can see with the textures, for example, or the scale of some of the images.
[00:20:51] They're just mind-blowing.
[00:20:54] It was so interesting.
[00:20:56] Yeah.
[00:20:56] And I mean, even ending up in business and focusing on business,
[00:21:01] I had to take like – I had to get an associate's.
[00:21:04] I went to NYU and it was like a liberal – not liberal arts, but it was like a two-year
[00:21:10] and then you still graduate the four-year, like some kind of an associate's program.
[00:21:14] And they had you learn a lot of these things which wouldn't necessarily be in the core curriculum of –
[00:21:22] if you're going to communications or psychology or business eventually.
[00:21:27] But I found even as I got into business, I would be reference checking some of the things I learned
[00:21:34] in those things that you would never see as connected because I think analogy and connection
[00:21:40] in various realms is often a great problem solver in business.
[00:21:48] Yeah, absolutely.
[00:21:49] I think that the most successful groups in business, in education, and kind of anything you're doing
[00:21:56] are ones where people have really different backgrounds.
[00:21:59] It's all fine and good to be with a bunch of people that have a huge amount of common ground
[00:22:04] that have a huge shared background.
[00:22:06] But you don't get that – yeah, that tapestry of different opinions and ideas and backgrounds
[00:22:12] and, oh, I heard about this, but it was in this context.
[00:22:19] That's one of the things – so, I work at Toastmasters and I have a team of people
[00:22:24] and we have really, really different backgrounds.
[00:22:26] I mean, I have somebody with a PhD in industrial organizational psychology.
[00:22:31] I have somebody who came out of political science.
[00:22:33] I have someone who has a physics background.
[00:22:36] Like, we're all over the place.
[00:22:38] And so, when we get some of these questions or when we're looking at projects, it is so
[00:22:43] fun to hear the different approaches that everybody would take to whatever the project is.
[00:22:50] Now, we're not going to do six versions of the same thing so that everybody gets to do
[00:22:56] their version of it, but it makes it so that when we're actually choosing the approach
[00:23:02] or we're talking about an analysis or decision point, that we can bring a bunch of extra perspectives
[00:23:09] in with all of their history, with all of their background, with everything that all of these
[00:23:14] individuals have that come with them.
[00:23:16] So, that it's a lot more intentional and it's also just way more interesting.
[00:23:24] Absolutely.
[00:23:25] Yeah, no, it's – I mean, when you look, even when you read biographies of great people
[00:23:30] and I think of Steve Jobs, for instance, and how important it was, I think it was a calligraphy course
[00:23:37] or like fonts and it's like, why is he studying that and walking in without a shirt or shoes?
[00:23:43] You know, like – but it's like what you were saying early, focus on your interests and if you
[00:23:50] focus on what you're actually interested in, it's probably going to work out because you're
[00:23:54] going to have a passion for something and it might not come out in the wash in that very first take,
[00:24:01] but years later when you succeed, you'll probably be able to connect it in some way to that passion,
[00:24:12] right? And I mean, being in Toastmasters, I remember I was reading a book about someone
[00:24:18] who wrote about TED Talks, which can be kind of similar with the public speaking.
[00:24:24] And those who are afraid to public speak are often afraid because we imagine ourselves speaking
[00:24:30] before a group of people about something we have no idea about and so we're going to have
[00:24:33] to rehearse it and memorize it. And the person who studied all these TED Talks and wrote about it said,
[00:24:39] if you talk about something you're passionate about, you actually won't have to really prepare.
[00:24:43] So just continually try to talk about things you're passionate about and make them better.
[00:24:48] If you prepare on something you're passionate about, it'll go even better. But we often follow
[00:24:54] your passions and what you're speaking about or what you're enjoying. It's probably a good take,
[00:24:58] right?
[00:24:59] Yeah, absolutely. If you are interested in something, then that is contagious and people pick up on it.
[00:25:05] And the people who let themselves get carried away with whatever it is they're talking about,
[00:25:11] if they're interested in it, those are the people who become more animated. They have better
[00:25:17] prosody and vocal variety when they're talking. They gesture and they bring you in.
[00:25:22] They're just way more engaging. And so, those are the people that are fun to watch do a thing as
[00:25:28] opposed to somebody who is giving you a book report on a book that they clearly hated. No one likes that.
[00:25:36] No one liked it in third grade. Nobody likes it today. You don't have to do that. So, don't.
[00:25:43] That's right. I always love in that line of the speak what you're passionate about,
[00:25:47] take the book report and pivot it into the thing you're passionate about somehow, right?
[00:25:52] It'll still do better with the audience. But coming out of that very interesting
[00:25:58] college experience, being away in France for a year, getting international business,
[00:26:03] out of that, how did you know what you wanted to do next or what did you lean into trying to do next?
[00:26:09] Yeah. When I got back from France, I actually got a position. I had two positions. I had one with
[00:26:14] a company called Boa Technology and they are a company that makes alternative lacing systems.
[00:26:21] So, if you think of like a snowboard boot, instead of a bunch of shoelaces that you're trying to yank on
[00:26:27] for a snowboard boot and then tie really tight and then hope that they don't loosen, what they do is
[00:26:32] they have like a wire system and then a gear where you pop the gear in and turn it and tightens the
[00:26:38] whole boot, stays tight until you release that boot system. So, I worked for them in marketing,
[00:26:45] communications, sales and marketing. And I also had a concurrent internship at the
[00:26:51] governor's office for the state of Colorado in their press and communications. So, I had these
[00:26:57] two really divergent work experiences that I got to be part of. One, Boa was basically a startup at
[00:27:03] that time. It was really kind of a small group of people. They were really energized, but it was a lot
[00:27:12] more casual conversation and communication, even though it was still this corporate. We were dealing
[00:27:19] with corporate partners and we had a snowboard team that we were sponsoring that I helped work with.
[00:27:26] It was still a lot more approachable, I think, than the governor's office, which is very not
[00:27:35] casual. When you write your governor, you get a letter back and a lot of those are very formulaic
[00:27:41] because that's what it is. That's what that kind of communication is and that's what the expectation is
[00:27:47] too. But it was really interesting. You saw all these different things come in from both of those
[00:27:53] different groups and I just thought it was so fascinating. And I liked doing that. I liked that kind
[00:27:59] of secondary communication piece where you're trying to relay information and make sure people
[00:28:07] understand what it is you're trying to tell them. Whether it's, yes, we can put a Boa system on this
[00:28:14] new running shoe you came up with or you have contacted the wrong branch of government and you
[00:28:20] need to contact the judicial branch and this is the executive. What are those different messages?
[00:28:27] How do you craft those? I thought that was really fun and interesting. And you get all these stories
[00:28:32] with that. So, you have everything, every communication piece is an opportunity for a story
[00:28:39] or it is somebody's story. Like it's part of somebody's life that they're reaching out to you
[00:28:44] to get you to put something on a shoe or have the governor write a letter or whatever it is that
[00:28:50] they want to have happen. And I just found that really compelling and interesting.
[00:28:55] Yeah. So, I did that and when I graduated, I didn't have like a job and I didn't really own anything
[00:29:01] because I was a college student. And I had a friend who was moving to Hawaii so I just went with him.
[00:29:06] And I moved to Oahu and I lived in Hawaii for about a year. I worked for a jewelry company.
[00:29:13] I got a good job at jewelry company and I handled corporate communications. It was the same thing. I got
[00:29:19] these stories of people trying to buy jewelry for their mom or their grandma or I bought this on a
[00:29:24] cruise or a vacation and it broke, can you help me? Or I saw this and I want to get one.
[00:29:31] But I need it to be in rose gold or whatever the little thing was that they wanted. And I thought
[00:29:37] that was the same thing. It was so interesting. It was really fun. Plus, jewelry has stones,
[00:29:44] like precious stones. And kids love rocks. I still like rocks. That was still really fun.
[00:29:49] That's true. And I mean, I had the chance to go to Oahu once for a family vacation.
[00:29:57] And I was shocked how far away it is from everything and how insignificant you feel in many ways. And then
[00:30:06] I remember after all the flying and I was exhausted, I was like still, I think maybe around 20 on this one.
[00:30:11] And I remember the winds at the first night and I'm like, this was a mistake. Even though everyone
[00:30:18] said this is, and you know, similar things in Florida, like being on the East Coast, you go to
[00:30:25] these places that are paradise. And it's a fascinating thing to me how one block over it's reality. And
[00:30:34] reality is not bad at all. It's just paradise is a totally manicured existence, right?
[00:30:43] Yeah.
[00:30:44] Yeah.
[00:30:44] Yeah.
[00:30:44] It was fascinating. I really liked living there. I thought it was really interesting. I loved my job.
[00:30:51] It was a really fun thing to do. I worked with great people that I still am friends with. It was
[00:31:00] really great. Plus the food was really good.
[00:31:03] Well, it must be. Yeah. Cause it's like right at the, at the cross section of
[00:31:08] kind of Western and Eastern culture. And then they had the, uh, what are the boxed lunches or
[00:31:13] so? Or what is the not spam? Is it spam?
[00:31:16] Is spam musubi?
[00:31:17] I think so. It's like spam is like the delicacy that's put into.
[00:31:22] And it's good too. You fried it good with a little bit of soy sauce.
[00:31:28] I'm a convert. I'll eat anything. So there's that, but.
[00:31:31] It must've been neat and, and a feeling of, um,
[00:31:38] like making it that you could work and have, I'm not going to say the tourism or hospitality
[00:31:45] aren't real jobs, but that's the majority of jobs really there. You had kind of a real job,
[00:31:50] right? That must've been interesting.
[00:31:53] Yeah. It was, it was very gratifying to come out of college because you get when anyone gets this,
[00:31:58] when they're in college, you say, oh, my major is this, that, or the other thing. Oh, my major is
[00:32:02] international business. Well, what are you going to do with that? And I was like business
[00:32:05] internationally. Like, I don't know. What are you asking me for? I'm just doing this.
[00:32:10] The thing I'm going to do when I'm done with this degree is have the degree and figure out the next
[00:32:15] thing that I'm going to do. That's right.
[00:32:16] Um, so it was really nice to have a thing that I could do after getting the degree. And it was,
[00:32:22] it was so fortunate that it was something that was so interesting with such a great group of people.
[00:32:27] And so it looks when you, uh, when you go on your CV,
[00:32:30] you might be the only person who went from Oahu to Milwaukee.
[00:32:34] I think so.
[00:32:36] So tell us what led you into Milwaukee, basically close into fall and winter.
[00:32:42] Yeah. So, and, and I did it, yeah, really at the low point from a weather perspective
[00:32:50] to leave Hawaii and move to Wisconsin. Um, I had met the, the man who's now my husband in college.
[00:32:59] And after we graduated, he had moved back to Milwaukee, um, and gotten a job there. And I,
[00:33:06] like I said, had moved away because why not? You can't stop me. Uh, he got a, um, sponsorship to go to
[00:33:15] graduate school in Milwaukee. And as much as I tried to convince him that he could do graduate
[00:33:22] school in Hawaii, it was not going to be sponsored or funded. And expensive to live there. Right?
[00:33:29] It was, yeah, it was going to be a big pain and he wouldn't have had the job and so fine. I get it.
[00:33:35] So I moved from, um, Oahu was built, uh, Waikiki was built on a swamp and Milwaukee was also built on
[00:33:42] a swamp. So he likes to point out that I just functionally moved from one swamp to another.
[00:33:46] Um, it wasn't, it wasn't quite that equal, but I did move to Milwaukee. I lived there about a year.
[00:33:56] I worked for a wealth management firm, again, doing communications, marketing stuff. Um,
[00:34:02] but that was, that was really interesting. It was a little teeny tiny firm. It was me and two guys.
[00:34:07] Oh, wow. And you also were a coach. Is that right? Field hockey?
[00:34:15] Yes. Yeah. So, um, my, my husband's alma mater from elementary school all the way up through high
[00:34:23] school had an opening for a girls field hockey coach. So I did that. It was seventh and eighth
[00:34:29] grade girls. Um, it was basically size whack-a-mole when you're in seventh and eighth grade. It's just
[00:34:36] thwacking things and trying to not hit other children, which they mostly did. But it was,
[00:34:44] it was fascinating. I had been a soccer referee since I was probably like 12 or 13 years old.
[00:34:53] Wow.
[00:34:53] So I was familiar with a lot of the cat herding that went into field hockey coaching, but it was,
[00:34:59] it was a different sport and it was weaponized. You know, they have those like clubs, it's kind of a lot.
[00:35:06] I, well, I think too, and I don't know if you agree with this, but when someone would look from
[00:35:10] the outside, looking in again, going Hawaii to Wisconsin, you'd be like, oh, it's crazy. That's
[00:35:17] just, man, I'm sorry. But, but there's life everywhere. There's commerce everywhere.
[00:35:26] There's probably parts about Milwaukee that you went, you know what? I like this a little better
[00:35:30] than, uh, even Oahu, you know, it might not be the weather, but everything really is a balance and
[00:35:36] a calculus of various things. And you build community, you build connection, you know, you
[00:35:41] ultimately married the person who was why you came there. And I mean, even going from, you know, to Denver,
[00:35:50] to there, to there, it, it almost is a, I find a nice feeling to know anywhere you go.
[00:35:59] There's, it's, it's, it's not the same, like there's some flavor and variety, but it's kind of,
[00:36:05] we're here. It's human, right?
[00:36:07] Yeah, absolutely. And it's when you move to a new place, what I found is that you can choose your level
[00:36:15] of engagement. Right? So, if you move to, if I moved from Oahu to Milwaukee and then just locked
[00:36:22] myself inside and was upset that it was cold, first of all, that would be very silly. But also,
[00:36:28] then it would have been miserable. And there would have been like no reason and I probably wouldn't have
[00:36:33] lasted an entire winter. But there's opportunities if you look for them, for community engagement,
[00:36:43] for doing stuff. So, being a joint, becoming a referee in Milwaukee, getting into that community,
[00:36:50] doing the field hockey thing. I was the field hockey coach for a couple of weeks and I was filling up gas
[00:36:58] for my car and one of the girls and their families drove up and then it's the Midwest. So, I was in a
[00:37:05] conversation for 45 minutes with this group of people because they're so nice and so inviting,
[00:37:11] but I also couldn't extract myself from it even though it was raining and I didn't need any more
[00:37:18] gas at that point. But it's something where I think that is another piece of this communication
[00:37:27] thing that I think is so interesting is if you're willing to try and talk to people who are around
[00:37:33] you in any situation, it's just more interesting to be there. Even on vacation or something, if you
[00:37:40] are willing to go up and try to have a conversation with somebody at a bakery, that's going to probably
[00:37:46] be a better experience than going in and not attempting to do that or just pointing at somebody or trying to
[00:37:56] offload that communicative interaction to something else like a smartphone or someone else doing it
[00:38:04] entirely and not even going into the bakery and smelling all their weird bread smells that you get.
[00:38:11] Yeah. Well, it's funny. I mean, I don't know if my wife and two boys, nine and five,
[00:38:17] I don't know if they would agree with me on this, but I have loved, maybe they'll say it's making them,
[00:38:23] but we do it together. At times of the year, like spring break where everybody goes
[00:38:28] to the same places like over here, Florida, right? And then you look at the spring break,
[00:38:34] maybe they're going to Disney World or one of the beaches and the price is gouged up because
[00:38:39] everybody's trying to go there at the same time. Whereas you go a week later, it's more affordable.
[00:38:43] It's essentially the same, but everyone's not off. During those periods of time, I've started going
[00:38:48] to go to the same place where nobody goes because with something like Airbnb, with American commerce
[00:38:55] in general, you can go to one of probably hundreds of cities around just this country and the weather
[00:39:04] might not be the same, but they might have a zoo, might have a beautiful house on a golf course and
[00:39:11] nobody's going up there at the time. The golf course isn't open. So the price of the house is really nice.
[00:39:16] They have game rooms. They got big malls. I'm speaking of Syracuse and I know we got Buffalo
[00:39:21] next, right? But this has become almost the, I don't want to call it a hack, but it's not that
[00:39:27] different. Yes, it's a little bit colder. You have to wear a jacket, but you're doing really fun things
[00:39:32] in a place that has an anchor to it for a long time and is over the moon that they have people coming
[00:39:41] there in April. So you're actually getting a ton of, uh, niceties like those Midwestern niceties you
[00:39:47] were talking about. And I don't know, there's something really cool to going where people
[00:39:53] don't go and they're not going, they're only not going there. I think because they're just following
[00:39:57] where everybody else goes. Um, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And you get, you get those, you also get a lot of
[00:40:06] like, why are you here? Um, what, why is there something wrong with you? Why would you come here
[00:40:15] now? I mean, we're glad to have you, but a lot of that kind of bafflement and that's also a really
[00:40:21] fun interaction to have with people. It's like, I don't know, cause you're here. Yeah. And so the
[00:40:27] next one is just going to even colder climates and maybe this one's more lake effect, but Buffalo for a
[00:40:34] meaningful seemingly five years, right? So was, was school and the, uh, trying to attain the PhD,
[00:40:43] ultimately your goal going there, did they have a program that was especially aligned with what
[00:40:47] you were looking at? What, where did a Buffalo come into play? Yeah. Um, Buffalo was, Buffalo was five
[00:40:53] years. Uh, it was for grad school. I got into the university at Buffalo. They have a linguistics
[00:40:59] program there. That's what I think it's lovely, but it was, it was really interesting. It was a program
[00:41:08] that had, uh, kind of a nice variety of focus areas that was really attractive to me because I didn't
[00:41:19] have formal background in linguistics. And I didn't really even know exactly what I wanted to do
[00:41:25] in the field. I had actually come back to Denver back home and visited a professor and told her,
[00:41:33] talked to her about how it was a French professor, talked to her about how I didn't know what I wanted
[00:41:37] to do, but I wasn't, I was kind of open to grad school and she suggested linguistics.
[00:41:43] So I bought a textbook, I read it, and then I applied to a bunch of schools and Buffalo let me in.
[00:41:48] Um, so they, yeah, they let me in, they, they did offer funding, so that did help.
[00:41:54] But my mom is from, is from Western New York. So she is from a town called Olean
[00:42:01] and that is south of Buffalo, a couple of hours, but it's a lovely little town. It's got this really
[00:42:09] beautiful kind of main street. It's got some great parks and that's where my grandparents were. So we
[00:42:15] had spent probably once a year when I was a kid going out to Olean. My mom has two brothers that are
[00:42:22] still in New York and I got a bunch of cousins and then another couple of, uh, well, an uncle,
[00:42:29] an aunt and uncle and a handful of cousins in Pennsylvania. So it was something that I had,
[00:42:34] I had been there and I had been there in February. So I was aware of what I was getting myself into
[00:42:40] with the weather at least.
[00:42:42] But it was an interesting opportunity, not just because I got into the program, but also because
[00:42:48] I had grown up really far away from all of that family. So I hadn't had that opportunity to get to
[00:42:56] know them as well as most people kind of expect you to know a lot of extended family like that because
[00:43:06] Buffalo is not easy to get to. It's easier now, but it's still not that easy to get to. It's not a very
[00:43:14] big airport. There's not a ton of traffic getting over there. So it was a group of people that, um,
[00:43:22] or an opportunity where I could spend time with that part of my family, with my grandmother and also
[00:43:29] get to go to UB. So that was, that was really interesting.
[00:43:35] Yeah. Isn't that really neat when
[00:43:39] I've had similar things. I, um, my mom was adopted, but the
[00:43:43] adopted family was very large, right? And so they were all over the country. And I found
[00:43:48] that it's like, you're automatically trusting of these people, but it's weird internally to not
[00:43:56] have a history with them. And so it's, it's like you're carrying what would be a history into a
[00:44:02] kind of new relationship, but, but it's over the threshold because it's family. And so you almost
[00:44:08] build it from there. There's something, there's something nice to that. I mean, the other way is
[00:44:12] cool too, growing up with them, you know, all the time, but it's a, it's a different kind of
[00:44:18] relationship I think than exists in many other realms.
[00:44:22] Yeah, absolutely. It's like in you're climbing a mountain, but these people, you meet them and
[00:44:27] you're already at 8,000 feet. So you don't have to do a bunch of that kind of initial trust building
[00:44:33] and groundwork. You're like, well, yeah, of course you're my cousin. So obviously you're going to come
[00:44:38] with me to the swim meet. What else are you doing? Also it's Buffalo in February. What else are you doing?
[00:44:46] That is true. And so it seems like it's not like you were looking to move. You seem to really like the
[00:44:53] program. It's you worked some web stuff in there. It seems like what were you, as you went through,
[00:45:02] what were you really gravitating towards in it? Like, what did your, what did your thesis ended up being?
[00:45:09] Yeah, I, I kind of did everything in that I, that I could do. I just started taking classes and it was
[00:45:23] in one of those classes that I read a paper that I thought was really interesting. And it's a paper
[00:45:29] where it's describing a bunch of children playing hopscotch and it goes into great detail describing
[00:45:40] the gestures that they use while they're talking about this hopscotch game. So that was really
[00:45:46] interesting to me in large part because I had all this background in communication, but it was almost
[00:45:53] all exclusively written communication where I had written an email or a letter and you send it off
[00:45:59] and then you just have to wait for another written communication to come back to you.
[00:46:07] Some occasionally with some of the positions I held, there was phone kind of stuff where, where I got to
[00:46:14] have real life conversations in real time with people, but that was not, not the majority of my work
[00:46:20] background. So thinking about not just the words by themselves, kind of in this calcified form of,
[00:46:29] of emailing or letter writing, but in language and communication as a living
[00:46:37] and, and time bound and kind of ephemera. What word I want?
[00:46:43] Dr. Justin Marchegiani
[00:46:43] Ephemeral?
[00:46:44] Where it like evaporates?
[00:46:46] Yeah, ephemeral.
[00:46:48] Dr. Justin Marchegiani
[00:46:48] Dr. Justin Marchegiani
[00:46:49] thing that happens that includes a bunch of other information all in one interaction is
[00:46:58] really interesting. You have things like directed attention. So if you and I are in a room and I
[00:47:04] go and I pointedly look at something else in the room, you will look usually at what I am looking at.
[00:47:10] Dr. Justin Marchegiani
[00:47:12] If I point to something using an index finger or using an open hand, then you will usually look at
[00:47:19] that thing. But I also can create constructed space between us. If we are talking and I gesture to
[00:47:27] something made up in front of me, then you can create a mental representation of this thing in this
[00:47:35] kind of vague space that's between us. And then we can use that as a kind of a node going forward in
[00:47:43] conversation and, and go back to this. And it can both help us align for what it is we're talking about,
[00:47:50] but it also can help us remember what it is we're talking about. So these can be things that are really
[00:47:56] helpful for spatial memory, they can be things that are really helpful for audience design for me
[00:48:03] crafting my message so that it's going to be best understood by you. They can be helpful for
[00:48:09] socio things where I'm trying to indicate to you that I'm thinking of a word, but I don't know what
[00:48:15] that word is. So maybe I flap my hands around and make a face or an um, something that's not
[00:48:21] technically a word, whatever you think a word is, because that's hard to define. But these extra pieces
[00:48:28] of communication that we mostly overlook or take for granted, or over prescribe, so you'll hear people
[00:48:38] say like, Oh, don't, don't move your hands when you talk. But that makes people much less fluent than
[00:48:45] if they just move their hands. It's a very natural involved with speech. It's a natural thing to do. It
[00:48:50] helps you speak as the speaker, and it helps your audience understand you as the audience. So that
[00:48:57] was the thing that I've got it obviously in the weeds with, I thought it was really, really interesting.
[00:49:03] And that is more or less what I ended up studying was this kind of conceptual progression from thought
[00:49:12] to speech. And one of the things that I looked at as a key was not just the gestures that you make
[00:49:18] along with speech. But when you come up to a break in fluent speech, so a lexical disfluency,
[00:49:26] how do you resolve that with gesture? What do you do to help yourself overcome that or help your
[00:49:33] audience get over it? So you might never get the word that you can't remember, but you can move past
[00:49:41] it with cooperative audience members. You got to have somebody who you're talking to who's willing to talk to.
[00:49:47] There is that.
[00:49:48] Yeah, it's very interesting. Again, I like the through lines from your history with language and how that's
[00:49:55] often used when people can't speak on top of it, right? Like, because there might be a difference in, you
[00:50:01] know, I can't speak French to someone who only speaks French. And so you start trying to do that as well. It's also,
[00:50:08] to me, as you explained that, an amazing connection to what came next, at least in our CV. But to
[00:50:19] basically get back home and work with Toastmasters, which is, you brought up um, and you brought up the
[00:50:29] gestures and, boy, that's an interesting uh, uh, confluence there.
[00:50:37] Yeah, it was, it was one of those things that just kind of worked out and then it worked out a lot
[00:50:42] better than I even thought once I got into the job. So Toastmasters is, we've been around for 100 years.
[00:50:49] This is our 100th year. Yeah, woo. Um, but it helps people with public speaking communication. Like,
[00:50:56] that's kind of the entire ethos of the organization. And the idea, the basic idea is, hey, try it.
[00:51:07] Just try, just try talking to people, try talking at people, try talking with people,
[00:51:14] and here's a bunch of tools that will help you do that. And then there's, there's projects,
[00:51:20] there's guided speeches, and there's a bunch of feedback and evaluation. But what's been really
[00:51:25] interesting for me from the language and communication perspective is that, now, not
[00:51:32] everything I agree with 100% in the program. A lot of this is stuff that I think is a little
[00:51:38] prescriptive. It's maybe a little bit yelly, a little bit overly...
[00:51:44] Rehearsed or staged?
[00:51:45] So, it's... Yeah, yeah. So, you kind of end up with, sometimes you get speeches where you have this
[00:51:53] regular cadence that you would hear from a newscaster. And that can be fine. It's definitely
[00:52:01] useful if you're just trying to report out information. But for a lot of different story
[00:52:07] structures, it's not really the best way to present information vocally.
[00:52:12] Rehearsed or something like that. But if you're doing it, if that's the option compared to not
[00:52:17] feeling comfortable enough to speak, totally sound like a newscaster, 100%. I'd rather you talk to me
[00:52:23] than be afraid or have a bad experience. Even if, you know, I personally don't find that the most
[00:52:31] compelling way to form a story or tell me your argument or whatever. It's better than nothing,
[00:52:38] for sure.
[00:52:39] Yeah. Well, I also think with a lot of these, if we call it prescriptive, which it needs to be in
[00:52:46] some ways, right? Because it's a learning tool and there probably needs to be some guardrails
[00:52:51] in that form of the prescription. But with a lot of these kinds of programs you might see,
[00:52:57] I think it's good to align to them to learn and then to almost just consume it into your being,
[00:53:05] and then come out the other end, tweaked, a tweaked version of who you are that's maybe a little bit
[00:53:12] more refined, speaking better to go forward with, right? But I think in anything,
[00:53:20] if you wholeheartedly, completely take the lesson and make it yourself, you're an AI model now, right?
[00:53:28] Like you're not you.
[00:53:30] Yeah. Yeah. The whole idea is to find the voice that works for you. So, I don't have,
[00:53:39] I don't really think that there's some sort of deeper essence to somebody's voice in some
[00:53:44] metaphysical sense or anything, but whatever is going to work for each individual, for them,
[00:53:51] for their life, for communicating, for making connections, for buying a roll in a bakery in
[00:53:57] Poland, for whatever it is you happen to be doing, just being comfortable enough with how you sound,
[00:54:05] how you present yourself to walk into that bakery in the first place, whether or not you speak Polish,
[00:54:11] English, and try and have some of those baseline communicative interactions where you, you know,
[00:54:19] make eye contact, maybe wave at the person. I don't know what you're going to do. That's the whole idea
[00:54:25] is if we're able to help one person buy a cupcake or a roll or whatever it is that they want to do,
[00:54:35] or get up and give a presentation in front of their organization, that's the whole idea.
[00:54:41] If I can help people make friends, that'd be great. But all I really, really hope that people
[00:54:49] get out of kind of any communication training is just this idea that it's not really that big of a deal.
[00:54:56] People are very, we're very concerned about how we come off, and I don't think it's that big of a
[00:55:05] problem. I think that if we can take as an assumption, which is something that we do from
[00:55:12] linguistics, that the people that we're talking to are cooperative communicators, that they're trying
[00:55:19] to have the conversation with us, that we're acting in good faith with one another when we have a
[00:55:24] conversation, then that takes a lot of that stress off, a lot of the pressure, and it's way more enjoyable.
[00:55:31] David Well, I think something like Toastmasters is very important because
[00:55:37] in our society, we connect speaking publicly with leadership, with authority, with being someone
[00:55:47] who's on the upward trajectory, that whether it's fair or not, because people can be great inputs to
[00:55:56] an organization regardless of that. But there's something that it becoming good at that moves you
[00:56:01] up quickly, oftentimes. So it is a good thing to learn from that point of view, because you can make
[00:56:08] up a lot of headway quickly, because so much is optics in this world.
[00:56:13] Sarah Yeah. And it's crafting your message for the people you're talking to, but it's also listening to
[00:56:18] the people that you're talking to, and then adjusting your message based on how
[00:56:22] it's working. So I think that's kind of the other piece of communication is getting that
[00:56:29] feedback and iteration, and adjusting on the flop, listening.
[00:56:35] David So I want to ask you just in a quick form what it is you do, because it's a really nice
[00:56:43] couple of paragraphs that tie together all these things you've done. But before asking that,
[00:56:48] a podcast like we're doing here, which is really a conversational piece for almost an hour,
[00:56:56] I feel like Toastmasters can't really deal with this yet. It's a little, it would be very hard,
[00:57:01] right? But I think there's something about podcasting that is a great antidote to where things
[00:57:07] are going, because everything is so packaged up. LLMs, AI, search engine, you never hear people just
[00:57:16] talking anymore. It's like the differentiator, but that's hard to teach this.
[00:57:21] Sarah Yes, it is challenging. We do have a project that is about podcasting,
[00:57:27] and that one is fascinating. It is, I'm going to say, probably not one of our most popular,
[00:57:34] largely because who's just going to make a single podcast episode? It's so much work.
[00:57:39] LLMs, AI, and how do you pick a topic, and who's going to talk to you, and so on and so forth. But
[00:57:44] the other problem that I think we have with situating that within the Toastmasters education
[00:57:50] program is that most of our speeches are set up as speeches where you're standing in front of a group
[00:57:56] of people telling them about something, telling them about yourself or about a research project or
[00:58:01] whatever it is that you're telling them about. And this is dialogic, right? So, it is a conversation
[00:58:08] between two or more people. And that is fundamentally different from this type of thing that most of
[00:58:18] Toastmasters training is set up for. So, that's a challenge. I mean, it's fascinating. And good podcasts
[00:58:26] are really fun to listen to when you feel like you're in the conversation with the people, even
[00:58:32] though you don't get any space to say anything. But they're hogging all the airtime. Rude.
[00:58:41] That's why it's good to have two people. It's real rude when it's a solo.
[00:58:49] Rude
[00:58:49] But it's, it is something that I think is a very niche skill that doesn't have to be,
[00:59:01] if that makes sense. It is just a conversation. But in order to have a sustained conversation,
[00:59:07] you do have to have quite a lot of buy in from both people.
[00:59:10] Dr. Justin Marchegiani That's right. And curiosity.
[00:59:13] Rude
[00:59:13] And we know it killed the cat. So, yeah, I have my one stock question to ask. But
[00:59:20] research and analysis department manager, what is that? What is that role doing on a day to day basis?
[00:59:28] What are your big outputs? What are, what are your big insights you gain?
[00:59:34] Dr. Jennifer
[00:59:34] Yeah, we handle all of the institutional wealth research and analysis. We do both parts,
[00:59:41] both kinds of music. So, we do organizational based reporting, we will pull all of the organization
[00:59:49] statistics and do looks, historical comparison, forward projections, those kinds of things. So,
[00:59:56] if you look at, we put out a CEO report biannually twice a year, and that has a bunch of graphs,
[01:00:02] and it says, okay, here's where we are at this point compared to that point. Here's where this
[01:00:09] initiative, how that initiative went, or this initiative, and here's how many followers we have
[01:00:16] on social media. So, we kind of collect anywhere that we can get data, and then try to put it into
[01:00:22] something that's digestible for different audiences. So, that's a lot of, that's kind of the more rote
[01:00:28] things that we do. We do a couple of surveys that we put out twice a year, satisfaction,
[01:00:35] an alumni survey, these types of things that you kind of expect a business to just do. But then we're
[01:00:41] also able to, because this is a communication organization, and because I have such a wonderfully
[01:00:48] varied group of people that I work with, and a fair amount of trust that we have built up within the
[01:00:55] organization, we're able to do a bunch of really fun kind of other projects. So, we do things like
[01:01:03] surveys that look at social capital, and how Toastmasters helps or maybe doesn't, but it does.
[01:01:11] Spoiler, it does help people with their social capital to improve that.
[01:01:16] We are able to look at evaluations. Evaluations are a big part of Toastmasters and the experience.
[01:01:24] And so, we have a partnership with a researcher at the University of Texas, Austin, Arlington.
[01:01:34] If it's the main one, it's Austin.
[01:01:37] I haven't. U-T-A. Anyway, where we're looking at evaluations. How do you give people feedback in
[01:01:47] real time that's useful, constructive, not mean, and didn't take you 12 years of communications
[01:01:54] training to be able to give them feedback on the speech that they just gave? We're able to do a bunch
[01:02:00] of things like that. And then web stuff, we have kind of weaseled our way into every corner of the
[01:02:08] organization so that we can help figure out what's interesting, find patterns, look for places that we
[01:02:16] can adjust or tweak little here's there'sies and give suggestions for a lot of it. And then also just
[01:02:26] basic reporting. So, here's where we are today. This is where we were a year ago. This is what we
[01:02:31] project we might be at a year from now.
[01:02:34] Justin Donald
[01:02:34] Very good. So, as I said, this has been a great hour. I'm going to ask you our, I feel like you're
[01:02:41] a natural podcaster. You could probably go to some of these long form ones even more. But if you were
[01:02:47] to go back in time and give your 15-year-old self a bit of advice, what would you tell that young Holly?
[01:02:56] 15. Okay, so right before driver's license. I think I would tell myself that I should keep
[01:03:14] trying things. There were some of these phases where I moved or joined a new community or started a new
[01:03:25] kind of phase of life where I was slow to start engaging in my community. And I think that that was a
[01:03:36] miss. I think that that was something where I could have figured out the local referee association and
[01:03:44] just started off a little bit earlier and started off with those connections and that community building
[01:03:52] right when I first got to wherever it is. I had kind of a tendency to nest and settle for a longer
[01:04:03] period than I think was really necessary now that I've moved a number of times and switched communities a number of times.
[01:04:11] And I could have just sped that up a little bit and had more time to enjoy in those groups and with those people
[01:04:21] and in those experiences.
[01:04:24] You could have learned Toastmasters then.
[01:04:29] Holly, this was phenomenal. Thank you so much for joining.
[01:04:32] Yeah, this was great. Thanks for talking to me. Thank you for entering the Conoverse.
[01:04:38] We hope these discussions gave you something to think about, helped you learn something new,
[01:04:43] and provided a window into someone else's story. Everyone's story is worthy and important. Until next
[01:04:50] time, remember to be fair, be kind, and keep exploring.