Growth is what you learn from a leap. You stop learning, you stop living. The point isn't the learning. The point isn't that you completed the course. That you got 80% on the silly test. It's that you take that and you do something on the jobs. I'm not sure we ever do master readiness. We're never looking at mastery. We're looking at a win. Hello there, it's me, Steve Mellor, and welcome in to Growth Ready. The podcast that allows high performers to reveal the reality behind what it means to ready yourself for growth. The personal and professional challenges along the growth journey, while also allowing the high performance executive coach in me to satisfy his curiosity toward what drives optimal performance. On this episode, we welcome the chief energy officer of Torrance Learning, Megan Torrance, and she's here to challenge us all to use learning to form awareness. But not reflecting on what works, what doesn't work, what would it be next time? How did that be all? Megan's philosophy is to support growth through teaching. But when it comes to how we utilize learning to optimize growth, she's here to help us all understand the importance of establishing purpose in the learning so we can be ready to do what it is we learn. That's what we do. We're going to be more discoverable and continue to have that significant impact on the community, of human performance and personal development that I know you are all benefiting from by being listeners to this show. Please go ahead, take the time, subscribe, rate the show today, and while you're at it, why don't you share it with a few people as well? I appreciate you guys. Let's get to the interview. Hello there and welcome into the most recent installment of the Growth Ready podcast. I am so excited to welcome in someone I had the pleasure of meeting in person, which so often in my world and having folks on the podcast, I don't often get to actually meet them in person. So it was a delight to meet Megan Torrance up in Ann Arbor earlier this year. And now Megan, I get to introduce you and bring you into the show. Before we go any further, you have to answer the question that I have. Really ask answer and that is what does it mean to you to be growth ready? So I love this. I have totally been stressing about this question. Here's the thing. In my own normal fashion, I split it out into two pieces, growth and ready. And so growth and I come from the workplace learning and development space and growth is what you learn from a leap. It's got a matter. It's got to be a stretch. It's got to be relevant and connected and learning opportunity. The ready though, it's the ready for the growth. It's do you have the skills and the mindset and the energy and the capacity. Do you have the tools and the team and the the access that you need to do it like and and we could keep pulling these apart for the next, I don't know, 45 minutes or so. But that's really what I think about whether it's as an individual, a team or a company. Yeah. I love it because straight away you've done what I really wanted people to do when I first came up with the name is I wanted you to just like, don't just take it as it is. Stop for a moment. Is it a statement? Is it a question? Which one of these words truly comes before the other? It looks nice in the logo growth ready, but is it growth ready or is it ready grow? You know, what, what is it? And what you've done here is you just allowed us to say, okay, well, if we were to divide the two and look at each individually, how do we now look at it differently? And straight away, I'm hearing, I want to now go into growth and I want to go into your story and your perspective of growth. When you say it's learning, you lead with learning and it's what you do, obviously within your business. But it's not about taking the leap. It's about learning from the leap. So tell me why it is the learning is such a pivotal important part of growth. Well, and here we get to my very first unpopular opinion of the day. On people say, oh, I'm a lifelong learner. I think human beings by definition are lifelong learners. Like we are just learning machines. You stop learning. You stop living as far as I'm concerned. And so this whole thing about learning, it's kind of funny, Steve. My grandmother, who nobody would say is like, oh, I don't come from a family of teachers. I come from a family of people who teach. And so my grandmother didn't learn anything that she didn't teach back to somebody. Like so she learned a craft. She teach it. She learned how to ride horses. Next thing you know, she's got a riding school. And all these things that she was the boy scout leader and the girl scout leader and all these things that she was always teaching other people. So I grew up with, that's what you do. You teach what you know to other people. My father was a newspaper editor and reporter and then ended up deciding that what he really wanted was to teach news editing and news reporting and ultimately media history and gets in all sorts of wonky. We're fascinating stories. So this, it's always been this, like how do I support others in their growth through teaching. And that learning component is a big piece of it. And in workplace learning, what's interesting and it's different than what we're all used to in like school and college and stuff. Right. Because when we're learning on the job, when we're learning in school, the whole point is learning. And our outcomes are our grades, right. Which anybody who's been in the workplace more than one job knows that your grades no longer matter. Like it just doesn't matter. Right. So in the workplace, we learn so that we can do a thing. The core point isn't that you got 80% on the silly test. It's that you take that and you do something on the job. So that learning is just a huge component of everything that I've done for seems like ever. It's such an interesting detail, how you led with not a teacher, but they taught, they teach. And when you said that, I'm thinking, okay, listen, so probably going, okay, that seems to be a little too far of a detail. Like is there really any difference? But what you just then went on to explain is where the difference is for me. And why I resonate so much of what you just said is I was that student who was a student who always questioned the education process. I never made sense to me because it's like, I'm not passionate about this. Therefore I don't want to do anything about this. I'm not interested in learning. I'm not interested. Whereas the moment you put me in a room where I'm passionate and I see a path to eventually do, I will eat that up. I will be your absolute grade A student. And it's why I've always classified myself as a student of life. You know, for me, life has taught me the most valuable lessons. And to your point, I now want to teach said lessons, whether that be through coaching, whether that be as a father, whatever it is. But the fact is is that what I'm hearing here is that this idea of growth stems from, are you on a path of alignment or passion with what it is you feel as though you want to be doing, right? Yeah. Yeah. I think I probably got an A or a B in both microeconomics and macroeconomics. At the time, one of them made so much sense. I cared about it. It was tangible. I could connect with it. I loved micro. I don't understand why everybody doesn't love microeconomics. Macroeconomics was obtuse. It was thick. It was hard. I didn't understand it. Turns out my macroeconomics professor went on to win a Nobel Prize in economics and right like this fascinating popular press book and all this stuff. I got about the same grade. One of them I still remember in use. But I want to tease apart the difference between being a teacher and teacher. And it's maybe an interesting specific thing, but we get really hot and bothered about it. They're teachers and instructional designers, right? The workplace, you know, psychologists and development folks, right? Learn how the brain learns. They learn ways to structure content in order to get people to learn it better, right? There is a profession. There's a science behind it. Teaching is, right? And so that's.
A teacher has a master's degree. A teacher has learned how to do this. You and I can walk into a, I don't have a degree in teaching actually, or an instructional design. We can walk into a room and start talking and do a lot by intuition. So I do separate out, formally educated people in the field from people who do it. And there's a Venn diagram and I'm not gonna say one is better than the other, they each have something to learn. (laughing) - I feel like you do have an opinion on it though. If I push too far, if one is better, or is it just more about the plate? Is it more about the context and the environment within which one is more important than the other? I suppose. - You know, in the, I think there's both an, are an a science to it. - Okay. - And so you can have the degree and struggle in the moment with execution. You can thrive in the moment and not know why. Actually, I take it back. So I, I knew I'd need a sports reference to talk to you, Steve. So I started playing ice hockey as an adult. I was 26 before I ever put on gear and started playing ice hockey. And I ended up, it's a really long story. I ended up as my team's goal tender. And I was not a team sports kid in school and all this stuff. So it's a whole new world for me and actually a goal tender is slightly not a team sport. So it was a good spot for me. But one of my coaches early on said, and these were in the days when Dominic Hasek was the goal tender for the Buffalo Sabers and he was famous for these like, outrageous like big maneuvers that were acrobatic and completely crazy and he'd stop the puck. And so everybody thought that was like that big showy, heroic save was the way to do it. As opposed to the quiet save that just works. Every single time or even better, the quiet positioning and being in the right spot at the right time, the shooter comes down the ice and says, yeah, I don't even have a shot. Because the goal tender is there and there's just nothing. So the shooter passes and has a fewer shots because you're doing it right. And so my coach had said, right, what he would rather happen is that the puck go in, but I do it right. Then I do it wrong and I make, I'm like miraculously make a save. So right, right. I love that. That it's a line of logic that helps me a lot just in the sense of, I think anyone listening right now is probably sitting there going, do I am a teacher? Do I teach like which one would I fall into? And so for you to sort of break that down and just say, let's think about what would we define as effective? What would we define maybe as most reliant, most reliable in these sort of situations that we find ourselves on our particular road journey? Again, if you listen to this and you're an entrepreneur, if you listen to this and you're in a large organization and you don't know your role compared to the person next to you, whatever your situation is, is irrelevant as long as you look at it through this lens of what you're saying from what I'm hearing. I've just this idea of like, what do you know is required from you in this situation to be of most value, to be most effective in this type of situation. So for me, that's how I'm hearing it. And so I'm curious like when you think about that story and I love the story, for you, from that point on, what changed for you, how did you then start to look at your role as the goal tender? Well, became what it created was an automatic rubric for self-reflection and learning. So if you think about hockey game and there's a lot that goes on, the goal tender stays on the ice the entire time and doesn't talk to the coach except between periods. And the, you know, a play comes in, you either make a saver, you don't make a safe. And that's an opportunity to reflect and learn every single time. The shot would be made and whatever happened, if I made the safe, then the play would stop and we'd have a face off if the puck went in, the play would stop, the face off would be a little bit further away. But I would then use that as a chance to say, well, what happened there? Where should I be? And especially early on, I would physically go and like replay, do the replay, it probably looked really weird. For slow beginner level hockey for me to go out there and be like replaying the shot again. And what I should do, and then I learn to do that mentally and my head, let's say I have that physicality down to it a little bit more. I was going to say, I just have this hilarious vision of you making the save, the face off happening, the game carrying on and then just kind of making the save again. Almost. Well, not all the game was. She on the ground again. No, no, no, no. I think the play was going. But yes, I would kind of move into the spot. What am I seeing and stuff like that? So yeah, yeah. It's such a big part of the growth process for me that you're capturing here. It's like, I'm always explaining the folks. We're never looking at mastery, we're looking at awareness. And that's really what you're speaking to. It's like every single opportunity you had to make that save or even see the put go pass you. It was another step towards a heightened awareness. And that was until your point going back to how you answered the initial question, that's how you were learning in that process to close those loops of growth each and every time as a goal tender. And so are you still playing today? You know what? I have switched to playing defense now. Okay. Funny enough, just like my son who, who gold tended for a while and then went out because I ended up, I ended up played constantly and I coached my kid. And so now I play defense. We have a fantastic goalan or team. They don't need me. I love it. And so did you, did you graduate? Is that graduating out of gold tending? No, no, it's two totally different things. Two different things. Yeah, when I first came to Icecat Hockey that like the, you think of the mighty ducks and stuff, right? You put the unathletic kid in the net. It's just a different kind of athleticism. It's a completely different game, a very different skill set. So it's not a, I actually, actually for me, it's a demotion. I am less of a risk when I'm playing out as a defenseman than I was. That if I were to play my, as a goal tender on the team, I'm on. Gotcha. Gotcha. Well, why am I mind starts going with this now is as we see, as we're going through that awareness and we're taking it in outcomes are changing goals are starting to change levels and the levels to which we are progressing is continuing to elevate more and more. No doubt you see that within these organizations that you work with. And so I'm just curious now from the perspective of goal setting and the need for milestones, because it feels like a really natural bridge to how you answered the ready component here. So I really want to just explore that for a moment is someone's going through. Let's say just looking at some of more your day to day things today with the clients you work with there with Torrance learning. Is your looking at progress and people are clearly closing these learning loops? How what is what what would you say your role is firstly is the one teaching to help people understand what is the obvious next step like how are you helping folks understand? Okay, the loop has actually closed and it's now time for me to go through another series of learning level up in some way and more than likely to set some more goals in that process too. Yeah, it actually comes back to right we figure out what is the purpose of this particular job role or your particular right your your job ladder and what do we want people to do on the job? And what are the reasons why they succeed or don't succeed and you can do this as a group level or as an individual level right now often the programs we're building are for large groups not individuals and there are a number of factors that we address before we get down to skilled development. So right it's it's it's the goal clear. Do we motivate around the go right do we incentivize the goal or do we actually incentivize something else is are the cues to performance like when you need to do this particular thing is it clear do we give you the tools you need to do it and if any of those is a no we fix those first and then we get to do you have the skills right do you have the skills and abilities to do this particular task or set of tasks in your job we then break that down into what are the component skills and how do we we level those up and and we can test them and nobody thinks that a multiple choice test in the workplace is a useful thing sometimes it's a necessary thing but can you do that on the job can you do that on the job consistently confidently correctly can we track that like is can we measure that in a way and if you can't how do we dissect what are the performance reasons why you can't do that particular task that then is is once you are able to consistently do that and confidently do that then we start looking at at leveling up right and then you know if we were to get back to that earlier discussion of readiness are you ready to take the next step now I don't think you have to always be a hundred percent ready now you read it could be are you ready to give that a whirl are you you know a lot of people have all the skills it takes to move to the next level but not the confidence I was actually talking to somebody but somebody we both know
about coming on this podcast. And I'm like, yeah, I don't, I just don't think I have an interesting enough story and things to say. And it's just like, oh my gosh. And she sent me a whole huge bunch of email. And I'm like, all right, all right, all right, I got this, I got this. And she said, "Any time you need somebody to pump your shoulders and be your cheerleader," I'm like, okay, got it, right? So I don't think you have to be fully ready, necessarily. - We're gonna come back to that in a moment because I want to, you know, that for me, if people didn't catch that for me, that was as arguably as significant and insight around the skill set discussion that really emphasizes going back now to the teacher versus the teacher is that the educational system doesn't care about any of that other stuff that you just alluded to before we get to the skill set. Typically, it's just like, this is the curriculum, these the skills you're gonna develop, this is what we're gonna educate you on, ready to set go. There's no, obviously there's no individual assessment or anything like that. We're just all in it together, doing it to this routine, whatever it might be. As you were explaining that there, I just think back to, and again, this is perfect world, very difficult to do in the educational system, but that would have been an environment I would have flourished in as a student had someone decided to go through all of that detail first before saying, and now that we know that, let's talk about the skill that we're potentially gonna be developing here or that we could look at developing here. For me, I'm just curious, when you're working with these larger teams around the concepts of what does good look like, what should the goals be? What do we have available to us in terms of tools and whatever it might be? How easy is that conversation for people to have it first, considering the educational system that we've all been brought up on? Yeah, and I think we have a vision of or perception of the education system as perhaps failing 'cause it's one size fits all and not individualized. And I think if we could go back there just a second, one, if I've got one teacher in a classroom of 25 or 30 people, kids, you know, for 50 minutes at a block, like you can't possibly individualize that. And yet, when our public education system or any education system is working well, actually there's a ton of thought that goes into, what do we teach in second grade and what do we build on in third grade and how do we build there in fourth grade? And how do we come back to these things and that is admittedly still challenging to do in a one to 25 ratio and particularly when and our best teachers know this, you write what comes into the room that day, the kids that come into the room are tired, they're stressed out, they may not be fed well, they might not have clothes that fit or are clean today, there's a lot going on. And actually this morning at a call with somebody in entrepreneur and he, you know, our last meeting was delayed because they had bomb sirens. And so he's like, yeah, I'm late 'cause I was in the bomb shelter. - Oh my God. - And so like we think we have it hard here in the United, you know, in the United States where we're kind of sheltered. But as we think about what tutoring can do, but and it's simply a one on one tutor for a student, huge, huge results, which is why you see huge results. We call this the two sigma problem, Blooms two sigma problems, where you can improve a student's capability by two standard deviations by giving them a tutor who is scaling the education and the learning to the right, we call the zone of proximal development, right, it's just the right amount of stretch. And knows when you're, looks like you forgot this thing that we covered a couple weeks ago. Let's go back there because you as an individual brain happen to forget these things, right? We can increase student performance if only we could give everybody a personalized tutor, right? Which of course nobody would, we can't even pay for a one to 25 ratio, right? Add a quality fund that, right? So along comes artificial intelligence. And it is not the panacea to everything. However, it allows us to get much more close to an individualized teaching frame, right? And before AI, a Khan Academy was doing a lot of work and it was not, it was machine learning, it was not Gen AI behind the scenes, they were really, really looking at what skills are you getting, what seems to be decaying, right, skill decay, which I don't use something or I keep using it and I keep taking shortcuts and they become burned in over time. Two different methods for skill decay. And I have this chance to be tuning using a computer system, right? An individualized program. So along comes AI, just heard a story from a public school teacher. Autistic boy is in her Gen Ed high school freshman class, right? It's a business class. She is constructed a room in a piece of software called Magic School. And the teacher has choice about what skills the room does. So does it give you a coach, does it give you a quiz, does it summarize things for you, does it give you sentence, starters, those kinds of things or does it not do any of those things? So you're in this room. Now, she's early on in the year, she's got this student who really can't deal with her vague instructions that work for all the other neuro typical kids in the class, right? She's like, all right, we're going to do this. And we're going to do this and you're going to go. And most of the kids are just fine with that, right? And then you had the 10% of the kids who are neurodivergent and struggle with that. And this boy would wait for her to come by and give her the individualized clarification that he needed, right? I'm looking at you smile. You're a coach. You get this, right? That's it, right? It's like a tutor for adults. So she would do, but she's got a classroom of other kids who have questions and he helps. So sometimes he'd sit there for 20 minutes, patiently waiting for her, not causing trouble, not doing anything, but also not doing any work. So she turns on magic school and turns on the skill in there that allows for a different explanation of the directions for the assignment. He goes in, gets his explanation and he much more clear and granular fashion step by step. He's off to the races. She comes by 20 minutes later. He's already done with the assignment, right? So super cool thing. So there's, there's, we have technology that can help us. And now what we need to be doing is thinking about how we include that in our leadership work and our teaching work and our team development work, not as a replacement. She's not replaced by this tool, not as a replacement, but as the augmentation that we have learned to not even think is possible. - Yeah. I love the story because I bet anyone who listens to this right now has felt like that child in their place of work. - Totally. - Yeah, I mean, I've been that guy to conference. I've been the guy to conference like, okay, right now what you guys do this, I'm like, people are writing around me and I have no idea what I'm supposed to be doing right now. Like I don't, and I swear I was paying attention. But for whatever reason, the way they presented it, it just didn't land with me. I needed that AI tool in that moment to say, Steve, this is what they actually asked of you to do right now. We put it in Steve's words for you. - Yeah. - Perfect, great. So we all can relate to that feeling, but I'm hearing that through the use of AI, had no idea we were gonna go down the AI hole today, but love that we're here 'cause I think we all need this through AI. And again, you can correct me if I'm wrong 'cause you're the expert here, but 'cause for me, this zone of proximal development that you speak to, I can't help but start to think that based on what we're able to acquire for ourselves in our respective works, we can start to use AI to maybe create some form of that for ourselves. So we know like this is where I need to be operating right now. Right? - Yeah, yeah. - Yeah, and I think there's a number of different ways that we can be thinking about our AI tools, right? As, right, I'm gonna use a coach, me as a workplace educator. We have the opportunity to set up both preparation for ourselves in our work, right? Environments for our clients and our learners, right? And at the same time know that they have the ability to do the same thing. So I work with, actually I work with three different coaches. That's a whole other story. But I work with three other coaches, but I will also sometimes open up chat GPT and voice mode while I'm on my commute. I'm like, "Hey, I'm walking into a. " And none of my coaches is available when I'm commuting at seven o'clock in the morning. So, and I work with them around the kinds of things I need to do in my life, but that last minute practice, boy, right, or that last minute framing or the hype or whatever it is that I need before I walk into a challenging conversation. I just did that last Friday. - I'm gonna need your AI transcript of what you asked it coming into this interview today. So, I'd love to read it. I'd love to read it. But this is, I think this is so good, Megan, because I think too often from a learning standpoint, even as organizations are trying their best, and even individuals are trying their best to get more specific, to really individualize the process is.
however an individual needs to learn to get to the heart of that, not just get to the heart of the skill set they need, but then to optimize it. That conversation can never end. Again, like I said earlier, it's not about mastering a process like that. It's how do we always level up the awareness to what the individual, to what the team, to what the organization needs so that growth becomes this consistent, we're giving growth and opportunity to take these leaps, like you alluded to there at the beginning, like we want people to take a leap. Sometimes that leap is a slow leap. Sometimes it's an immediate fast leap. But what you're talking to is how can we use learning as a way to give ourselves the best chance to even experience the leap, right? Yeah. Yeah. And when we're thinking about learning, right, we're thinking about something new, we're thinking about something relatively within our grasp. We're thinking about something relevant, right, not macroeconomics, so I'm getting better at that. I wonder where I get from. Right? Something that we feel is relevant and then something we can apply and get feedback in the real world. And so I can learn something, but if it's too easy, right? So there's got to be a little bit of struggle and stickiness. So that's the downside of some of the uses, not all, but some of the uses that we're getting out of AI, kind of the downside of Google. Or a smartphone, right? I don't remember anybody's telephone number anymore. Right? And that's the kind of the classic example we don't have to is and now we could say my brain gets freed up to remember other things, but the things that are a little bit difficult and that's why that leap in learning, right? There's some added emotion to it. There's a little bit of performance stress. There's something hard about it and we do it and then we get feedback in the world. Did it work? How did it work? What would I tweak again? And I think that's the other as we come around a learning loop. We go back to the goal tending example, right? It's the reflection. I can take shot after shot after shot after shot. But if I'm not reflecting on what works, what doesn't work, what would he do next time? How did that feel? Well, right? Then I'm not fully completing that learning loop. Yeah. Yeah. I'm a visual person and as you're talking through this, the loop is the growth and the leap is the readiness. Yeah. And so the leap here is and it's perfect segue to go now into what you said earlier about we're not we're not always ready. And I'm curious like let's say you're working with a client as you have done. You've got numerous clients you've been working with years on years on years. I'm sure you have a lot of the same folks within those organizations that are periodically going from one level of learning to another level of learning. And yet I have no doubt would those same individuals you still see some of those emotions come to the surface when they're about to encounter that next loop. So for you and your experience and maybe you speak to me for crying out, you've got three coaches. So you're going through your own loops and your own leaps, you know, maybe from your own experience, but certainly from the experience of what you're doing with you with your clients, what is it for us as humans? Why is why is it seems as though there's not enough loops for us to go through to ever actually just sit and say, no matter the leap, I'm always going to be ready for it. So what do you tend to notice in our human behavior that's keeping us from truly mastering let's say that readiness? Well, I'm not sure we ever do master readiness. Right? Like I think that it's, it's where we're many of us. Now this may be a self-selecting group. Right. And I think you mentioned it in a recent podcast I was listening to a few years ago. And it's like the people who listen are the people who are interested in this topic. Right. So we might have our own little echo chamber. We have a little one audience. But I feel like as I think about just my own leadership team at Torrance Learning and as we take on new things and you know, sometimes I look across the table or across the zoom. And I see a bunch of people going and they're gulping like at this next thing. And I was just reflecting the other day as somebody kind of took on this new thing and she kind of gulped. And she said, well, in order to do this, we're going to have to have this in this and we're going to communicate to these people and all this stuff. And I can sit there and say like, wow, three years ago, you just would have stopped at the gulp. You just stopped at the gulp without even understanding why you were stopping because you would have stopped at your idea of the gulp. When I, my idea of the gulp was something way bigger than that. And it was just so interesting. And yet there will be more. Right. And not because I'm a relentless driver. But because we're curious, that's what humans do. Right. We're curious. We want to go find new things. We explore things. And everybody has that in their own style. Right. There's a million different personality styles. Right. But there's, it's why, right. Athletes, generation over generation over generation get so much better. Are human beings necessarily materially different? No, we've learned and we've perfected techniques and we keep pushing ourselves. But we also have that benchmark to then push past. So I'm not sure we're ever ready. And once we do something, I'm not sure that that's the last. Right. Maybe why I'm terrified of retirement. Yeah, it's why my wife consistently reminds me no matter how many plans we make for the retirement years. She's like, why are you acting like you're going to? You know, is that the learning loop is, I think so much of what we're talking to. And again, I appreciate you acknowledging the listeners that we have for this show. People aren't listening to this show who are planning on, you know, putting up the white flag and being done with their careers anytime soon. And so with that being said, I think we have an audience of aspiring learners who are curious about what the next loop may be and why. And I think that's where you've taken us today is that the curiosity into the why is really the challenge. It's not that we know we're capable of the learning. We know when we apply ourselves that we're going to close the loop and we're going to then go and search for the next one. The question is, why should this be the loop that we go after? And I love that example of the person on your team, the gulp three years ago, it was a gulp. And then that was it. You know, the amount as well just get off the call. But now it's a gulp. And okay, I can respond. My body's telling me this is uncharted territory or this is going to be a challenge. And yet the amount of learning loops has allowed them now to figure out a response system of some sort as well. What does that look like for you? Where are you still gulping in your world currently? I'm dying to know. Oh gosh. I've got a book coming out a couple months. So the gulp is, am I ready? And it's been sitting in the production process for a while. Am I ready to really capitalize on that? And we've got some business expansion and some clients who are saying, hey, we'd really love if you would take this next great big leap. And part of me says, like heck, yeah. And then part of me says, but in order to do that, I need these 17 things in place that I don't know how to do. I don't even know how to define them. I know the names of them. And how do I go forward? So that the some business expansion things, some technology things that we're building, which are super cool. They're not shiny. They're cool because they're so brilliantly conservative. And so we're doing some AI things. We're literally the innovation is not. It's fanciiness ability to spin plates and rather, it's tummy and tap its nose at the same time. It's, it's innovation is in how throttled it is and how carefully we're watching it. And so I nerd out on that. It's probably somebody else's podcast. But so there's things. And then in my personal life, I'm actually training right now for two endurance hikes this year, a 22 mile in a couple months, for which I am not feeling ready and 20 mile about four months after that. So this is, this is such a wonderful place for us to start to bring this to a close because there I was talking about the why behind the learning loop. And you can call it learning, but you can also call it experience too, like what you're speaking to there with those with those hikes. That's going to be an experience. But without a doubt, you're going to learn a whole bunch of stuff while you're doing it. Why is it right now for you? Where you are in your world, like to your point, maybe you built a business where retirement makes a lot of sense. Maybe you built a business where slowing down makes a lot of sense. But for whatever reason, what makes sense isn't appealing. So for you, I think this is a great opportunity for us just to get into your mind as listeners to say, what is it that feeds me, intolerance to say, okay, I'm more interested in still doing things that are going to force me to ask why on earth am I going to do this?
doing this in the first place, but I'm really excited to do it anyway. You know, I think if we could figure that out, I'd have a lot figured out. I just am passionate about helping other people how to do things right and better, right? I'm passionate, not right. I actually believe there are many right, many ways to be right. I'm passionate about new ways to make things simpler and more cool and to share that with other people. I can't really explain the hiking like, why do I want to go and hike for 8, 10 hours at a time, other than that it's something totally different. But I think that's a good answer. I think that's a really good answer. I think that's something that I think that that's interesting because you're clearly ambitious and focused towards delivering these simple and these cool methods and teachings and technologies for those that you work with in the business. But at the same time, I'm hearing that there's this other part of you though that still needs the, it's different. It's just different. And that is going to challenge another area of your learning, of your experiences that I have to assume compliments what is in many ways now, probably normal and not necessarily comfortable, but certainly familiar. Like you are so familiar in the world that you operate in now, that difference sounds like it's a healthy difference. Yeah, and it's almost like a yet in a yang, right? Or a reinforcing feedback loop because in my day job where I'm trying to develop, you know, basically systems of learning, environment, spaces, communities, whatever, where it makes it easy to do the next right thing. That's what it's about. That's what my day job is. But I sit in a chair and stare at a laptop all day long. Like 10 hours a day, there's a lot of zoom, right? And then, you know, on the weekend, I go on, I'll spend 10 hours in the woods doing something sweaty and hard and dirty and painful sometimes, right? And that's, and you write, it is a learning experience. And then I get to come back in my rest days or gloriously spent for 10 hours in front of a computer. Yeah, and we get to come full circle now with this entire conversation is that for us to start off and you answer what it means to be growth ready through this notion of we want to learn through these loops. We want to know that these loops are stretching us, but at the same time, the only way that we can possibly assess readiness is by opening ourselves up to different skills, different mindsets to truly test our capacity through each one of these learning loops. And for you quite frankly, from what I'm just heard in that response, there's an argument to be made that your capacity, while constantly being tested within the business, still has so much more room for growth by expanding it outside of the day to day by saying, if I entertain this in my free time, if I make room for these challenges throughout my year, my capacity in many ways is going to be tested to an endlessness, like there is no there should be no end to how I can potentially be testing that capacity. That sounds fun. That sounds fun. Growth's fun. Growth's fun. And so for me, I think that's what I'm taking away from our conversation, Megan, is it's not as much, hey, just going search of the learning loop, but it's also like, if you feel as though you're getting to capacity with that, you need to look in a different direction. You need to look somewhere else to say, where's the capacity not been breached yet? Where have I not actually gone down the pathway of learning that could further expand upon a level of capacity that I didn't even know was there? It goes for me. We're curious individuals. So why would we stop that curiosity? And I think sometimes the why is simply because we're curious. Yeah. That's enough. Megan before I let you go, I need you to tell everyone where we can learn more about you, Tarant's learning. And hey, if there's some pre-ordering stuff that's coming down the pipeline, with the book, even though we're still a couple of months out, any information that we should probably know about you at this point. Yes. I spent a lot of time on LinkedIn. So Megan, Torrance, I have a delightfully not common name. And we're at torrentslearning.com and then the book, yeah, the AI implementation guide for for L&D, which in my environment, L&D is learning in development. And the beautiful thing is that it's not a book about AI. It's a book about the conversations we have in organizations in order to improve our capacity and our competency in implementing AI systems. So that's the it doesn't even talk about it. I don't even think it mentions a single AI model and the entire thing. And instead talks about how we connect as people to bring these new tools to use. Look at that. I didn't even know the name of the book. I didn't know exactly what it was about. And yet we've somehow had a conversation that touches quite wonderfully on everything that the book is about. And so that was that was good. And for me, I'm just so appreciative of the time. I'm so thankful for the the generosity of insight. I'm so glad that we were able to squash all those concerns. Have you been able to bring any value to this episode because you've done so in abundance. So you can just drop that one in the the last column in terms of what you thought was wrong. What are common friends. A joy. I know you're listening. So appreciate that. But Megan, listen to me in time. Just best of luck with anything and everything you've got going on in your world because I know it's only going to continue to grow and continue to challenge you and everyone around you. So best of luck with everything. Thank you. And next time you need an office in Ann Arbor, you know where to find me. Sure do. Thanks again. Thank you for tuning in to Growth Ready. If you liked what you heard and are feeling ready to grow, be sure to leave a five star rating, subscribe to the show and share the episode with someone you know is ready to fuel their growth journey today. We love our community. So don't hesitate to reach out to us at
[email protected]. And until next time, we are Growth Ready. And you will be too.
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