Episode 60: Elaine van Bergen - Tech Maven

HEATHER NEWMAN:  Hello everyone. Here we are again for another Mavens Do It Better podcast where we interview extraordinary experts who bring a light to our world. I am very excited to be here at a ESPC19 in Prague and I am sitting here with the awesome Elaine Van Bergen. Hello.

ELAINE VAN BERGEN:  Hello. I think I want you to be my hype woman. That's awesome!

HEATHER NEWMAN:  No problem. Happy, happy to do so. So, you know, we're here at another Microsoft conference. Um, well it's, it's a third party conference, but there's a lot of Microsoft folks here, including yourself. Um, do you, uh, tell everybody where you're from and uh, your, your wonderful job.

ELAINE VAN BERGEN:  Yeah, so I am from Melbourne, Australia, so down the bottom of Australia and I'm all the way over here in Prague, so long way to come. Um, and I work in the Commercial Software Engineering team at Microsoft. So that's the team that goes around and codes with organizations that are trying to do some stuff with, you know, machine learning, AI, kind of cutting edge things and we help them do that. And I specialize in the health space. So that keeps me super busy.

HEATHER NEWMAN:  Yeah. So health space meaning healthcare?

ELAINE VAN BERGEN:  Healthcare, yes.

HEATHER NEWMAN:  Yeah. Got it. Oh wow. So you're going in and is it mostly hospitals or is it bigger conglomerates or what's the?

ELAINE VAN BERGEN:  Yeah, well, it's a bit of a bit of a range because, um, healthcare is different all over in different countries. So, um, one of the projects I've just done was with a very large government department in Australia called new South Wales Health. And they're a bit unique because they actually have a part of the organization that runs all the pathology centers in the entire state. So they have that kind of mandate where they can then do projects with, with that kind of scale. Whereas a lot of other places in Victoria where I live, there's four or five different private entities that do that same function. So it's a big range. It's so, so exciting and different wherever you go.

HEATHER NEWMAN:  Yeah, that's cool. And so it's, you're based in Australia, in Melbourne and, but this, this organization that you belong to and your job is, is globally.

ELAINE VAN BERGEN:  Yeah. So CSE is a global team. Um, and so then we have some people which are in dev crews that spend all their time coding and others of us that are specialized in industry areas. And so the healthcare team is sort of one of the, the smaller ones cause it's bit new. Um, and there's a bunch of bunch of the team in the US bunch in the UK and then a few in Europe and me on the other side of the world.

HEATHER NEWMAN:  That's so cool. Have you ever been to the HIMSS conference?

ELAINE VAN BERGEN:  HIMSS no, I've heard fantastic things about HIMSS. Um, yeah, it's on my to do list for sure.

HEATHER NEWMAN:  For everybody listening HIMSS is the largest health care show that happens in the world and it's, I think it's usually in February. I think it's in like Orlando a lot of the time.

ELAINE VAN BERGEN:  Yeah. And they actually do regional ones as well. So they're all different ones all around the world with slightly different focuses.

HEATHER NEWMAN:  And it's kind of an organization too that I think one can belong to in different ways with chapters and that kind of stuff. There's some of that too. That's super cool.

ELAINE VAN BERGEN:  Yeah. And we are quite lucky in that at Microsoft we have, um, industry teams that are in the local subsidiaries. So in Australia there's a health care team and they have a doctor who's a member of the team, an ex-nurse as well. So as a technologist I can then partner with them and make sure that anything we're doing is, you know, ethically aligned and actually, because obviously someone can't just learn health care. Super quickly.

HEATHER NEWMAN:  Boom, now I know everything.

ELAINE VAN BERGEN:  And now I'm a doctor!

HEATHER NEWMAN:  Snap, snap, my gloves. Yeah. Yeah. That's so wild. So yeah, I guess that begs the question, like how you get to leverage these people and work with them and understand things. How much health care knowledge did you have kind of coming into this and did it, did it matter or does it, did, was it like I can learn this or?

ELAINE VAN BERGEN:  Yeah, so I had a little bit in that I'd worked with a bunch of hospitals in my previous consulting jobs and a few other organizations. Um, but yeah, definitely not able to talk all those acronyms when I came in. And, and as we're a team that works together sort of picked up a bunch of those. Um, but also I've been learning a lot about what we should do and what we shouldn't do. You know, my first healthcare projects, it's always, um, been impressed on me that we don't want to replace clinicians, or, you know, actual medical experts.

HEATHER NEWMAN:  With robots.

ELAINE VAN BERGEN:  With robots. That's one area where I think we differentiate at Microsoft to compared to some of the other players in the market. Um, where we talk about human plus robot can hopefully help do things. And that's, you know, there's some great scenarios where we can help give overworked clinicians more time to spend with their patients, by taking a little load off them.

HEATHER NEWMAN:  Yeah, sure. That's super cool. So how did you get started in IT? Like, like where you're from, from like that origin story stuff.

ELAINE VAN BERGEN:  Yeah, I was a natural born geek, um, type. I've always been into IT. The story my dad tells is that when I was a kid I wanted a computer and so he gave me parts of a computer and we had to build it together.

HEATHER NEWMAN:  Wow, that's awesome.

ELAINE VAN BERGEN:  Yeah, he used to work in IT, so, and I can't even remember if that's true or not, but that's his story. Right? Um, and then yeah, even at school I did IT stuff. Went into a degree which was joint electrical engineering and computer science. Um, because I thought initially I wanted to build computers and then really loved the programming stuff the most and ended up in bouncing around through a bunch of different, different companies. Doing a bit of consulting. Then landed at OBS which was the company that built Nintex. So, did a little bit of product and consulting. Eventually made my way to Microsoft.

HEATHER NEWMAN:  Wow. Sure. That's a cool trajectory. I love your story about your dad. I wonder, can you guess like what computer it was potentially? I know you don't remember, but like I wonder what it was like or if you know, like a Commodore 64?

ELAINE VAN BERGEN:  No, it would have, we had a BBC computer at home before that, so that was, but it would have been like an x86 or you know, it was just that era.

HEATHER NEWMAN:  Yeah. Wow. That's so funny. Did you feel like growing up in Australia, like the, in Melbourne as well, that you know, is tech one of those things, you've always been a geek, right? You were just saying like, is that something that's really prevalent there? You know, as far as like going after that when you were in school and then, you know, there's, I'm sure there's colleges and stuff, but is that a, is that a, is tech like something that a lot of people go into?

ELAINE VAN BERGEN:  Uh, seem to be relatively prominent and I guess, yeah, I was lucky in that, uh, wasn't until I got to university and, and there was only one other female in the electrical engineering class that I was in that I even had any concept of perhaps not everyone goes into IT and I, I loved it. So, you know, I, it was kind of, yeah, never sort of saw or any of that, that other side of things. Um, but yeah, I mean I'm part of this organization or organization at the moment called Science and Technology Australia as one of the superstars of STEM. And the purpose of that is to get all these science and science and technologists out into the media and talking to kids at schools and stuff. Because the scary thing is in Australia, the numbers of people coming out of school and going into science and tech, particularly females is actually going down. It's lower than when I came out of school.

HEATHER NEWMAN:  And you're not that old, but still.

ELAINE VAN BERGEN:  Yeah. It was a little while ago and it should be going up.

HEATHER NEWMAN:  Yeah. One would think. I wonder why that is?

ELAINE VAN BERGEN:  Yeah, I mean that's a really hard question because um, I also balance that out with so many people I know. And the reason that was we had to kind of apply for it and it was a big competition to kind of get in. And the reason I did that was because so many people I know accidentally ended up in IT and they love it, particularly people from diverse backgrounds. They thought IT was going to be boring or they'd be locked in a basement coding or whatever. And it's not any of that stuff and they love it. So I don't know whether that's some of the reasoning. Um, I was talking to another person last week who's in kind of tertiary education and around how when people come out of school with high marks, they're told they should do medicine or law. And IT would waste their time and maybe that's part of it, but that's always been around.

HEATHER NEWMAN:  Completely. I wonder if it's also about like that it's not seen as creative.

ELAINE VAN BERGEN:  Yes.

HEATHER NEWMAN:  You know, like to me being a theater major, I, I thought technology was the one place that I had seen where the excitement and the passion and that creativity was on point. You know.

ELAINE VAN BERGEN:  Yeah. Yeah. And that's why something I always make sure I talk about particularly to school students and you know, young people in the industry. Cause, I mean that's part of what I loved about it. You don't have to follow all the rules either. You know,

HEATHER NEWMAN:  Right, you can break stuff.

ELAINE VAN BERGEN:  You can break stuff; you can try different ways. That's what it's what it's all about. I can't draw, I can't paint. People can't even read my handwriting. Um, but I can build something. So, yeah, my form of creativity is putting some code together that does something awesome.

HEATHER NEWMAN:  Yeah. That's awesome. Um, so with what you're doing with healthcare and we've got, you know, Office365 and Teams and all of that stuff, what are you seeing for that space that they're really latching onto?

ELAINE VAN BERGEN:  Yeah. Well some of it is really simple things cause particularly in the healthcare market, while it's not particularly unique, I guess they have less money than some other places and they've always got this competing kind of thing where I could buy a machine that saved someone's life or I could do an IT project. Most of the time you're going to buy the machine.

HEATHER NEWMAN:   IT is not winning that. As much.

ELAINE VAN BERGEN:  Exactly. And so, um, but those systems that they do have get really, really old. They're still awesome, but they're not great to interact with. So we're seeing a lot of popularity in putting, you know, PowerApps and Power Automate and Flow on top of things or pushing just notifications into Teams and getting the data to where people can collaborate on it. Not necessarily removing it from that awesome system, but you know, just here's a nice interface where you can enter things in. Or see a report in PowerBI and other amazing just proper reports. Um, some of the reports that I've seen coming out of health that the people are using look like 20 years ago cause that's when they were built.

HEATHER NEWMAN:   Yeah. Yeah, yeah. No, that makes total sense. Wow. Um, and so what do you do when you're not traveling? Cause you're like, how much do you travel?

ELAINE VAN BERGEN:  Oh, it depends. Month to month. Um, yeah. So this month I've traveled a lot cause I've had, but it's been for like four different completely unrelated things.

HEATHER NEWMAN:   Work and play?

ELAINE VAN BERGEN:  Mostly work. I went to science meets parliament to, um, where they connect technologists and scientists with politicians in Australia.

HEATHER NEWMAN:  What, um, that's cool.

ELAINE VAN BERGEN:  That was super cool and interesting and they, you know, they'd teach us about how, how politics works and how it could potentially influence that. Um, and then this conference obviously before that we were lucky enough to have Satya visit Sydney, so had a big event for, for that.

HEATHER NEWMAN:   Yeah. Oh, that's fantastic. So when you, yeah. So when you aren't doing the travel, like getting some balance in your life. What's, what's the, what's your recipe for success there?

ELAINE VAN BERGEN:  Well, I mean, what I love about Microsoft is how flexible it is. So, you know, sometimes particularly to get to somewhere like Prague, you have to fly on a Saturday or Sunday and so then, you know, you typically won't work a couple of days and most of the time, um, I'll spend a lot of time working from home, which is great. Like I'll Monday I'll drive my kids to school, pick them up from school. Um, and yeah, just all that kind of kind of thing. Um, chilling out at home. Yeah. Over Christmas everyone's like, Oh, you're going to go away? I'm like, Nope, I'm just going to actually be at home.

HEATHER NEWMAN:   There's something to the, I don't know, recharge.

ELAINE VAN BERGEN:  Yes.

HEATHER NEWMAN:   You know, and the rebalancing yourself when you've just, I travel a lot too, as you know, we see each other at these things a lot and half the time, you know, we've like, we pass each other, give each other a high five and like everybody, when we were walking up here, I was about to go to the bathroom and we were coming over to find a place to sit and I think you and I both yawned so big that we could have caught like a million flies. It was just, we were both like, okay, totally. Okay. Yeah. Well, okay, we're going to get this done in and, but, but you know what I mean it is.

ELAINE VAN BERGEN:  It gets exhausting. Yeah. And so the last thing I want to do over a holiday period is then go on holiday when everyone else is on holiday.

HEATHER NEWMAN:   Well yeah, right? I mean, yes, NO. Yeah.

ELAINE VAN BERGEN:  I'll go when it's nice and quiet. And again, the work flexibility is great for that.

HEATHER NEWMAN:   Absolutely. And how long have you been at Microsoft then?

ELAINE VAN BERGEN:  Almost three years. Flies really fast.

HEATHER NEWMAN:   Yeah, no kidding. That's a blink. And you were, you said you were a consultant before. What were you doing then?

ELAINE VAN BERGEN:  Yeah, so I had an interesting career trajectory in that I've worked at a bunch of different places and I kept, um, ending up managing teams of people. So.

HEATHER NEWMAN:   Not Microsoft Teams, but teams "of people", actual humans. Okay.

ELAINE VAN BERGEN:  Um, which, which I liked, but I really love technical stuff. And so I've sort of, you know, at one stage I was managing a team of 80 people for example. That's a lot of people and obviously that wasn't all 80 reporting to me that would be crazy.

HEATHER NEWMAN:   Is it the same thing as they say with kids, like if you have three, you can just have four and it's fine. And so like if you have 50 and there's another 30, it's totally cool.

ELAINE VAN BERGEN:  Not if you want to do it well. I like to say that people shouldn't manage directly anyway more than about five people cause you just don't have time. So, um, yeah, with that many people, you have all kinds of managers below you that manage their teams and report up. But yeah, I don't mind managing people. I thought it was fun, but no one ever came to me and said, Hey, you're the best manager I've ever met. Um, while I do get compliments some of the technical stuff, Hey, I need you to answer this question. And that's what I love about Microsoft. There's roles where you don't have to manage people to move up in the hierarchy where most everywhere else you hit that ceiling and you have to manage people whether you like it or not or want to or not.

HEATHER NEWMAN:   Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And there's an art to it as well. And you know, not everybody is a manager.

ELAINE VAN BERGEN:  Yup. Yeah. I mean, I did, I've done an MBA and a bunch of other courses and you know, I think I was a good manager, but it wasn't my passion. It wasn't my passion. Tech stuff's my passion and I don't mind roles where I do a lot of tech and still manage some people. But when you get to that stage of having a large team where you're spending all your time managing people and KPIs and budgets and all that kind of thing, that that's not my thing. And it's other people love it. They should do that.

HEATHER NEWMAN:   Have you ever, uh, owned your own business and maybe that's a no, because of all that stuff you were like, Oh, that's a big uh-uh for me?

ELAINE VAN BERGEN:  Not for me. Yeah.

HEATHER NEWMAN:   Any desire?

ELAINE VAN BERGEN:  No, no, not at this stage in my career. Who knows? Maybe later. Um, I mean I'm, I'm divorced and got two kids and the stability of having a job where I know everything that's happening, it's not going up and down is what I'm after.

HEATHER NEWMAN:   You can't see the smile on her face about that, but it's a pretty big one. It is an interesting thing because it's like you, I don't know, I think we, we, we all look at that. You know, whether to be a consultant and you were consultant for a while. Yeah. And the ebb and flow. How was that for you? I mean, did you really feel like the roller coaster of being a consultant of getting jobs in and not and things going away and stuff?

ELAINE VAN BERGEN:  Yeah, and luckily, um, when I worked at OBS, um, Brian Culkin and Brett the managers there.

HEATHER NEWMAN:   Cause that's when I met you. Cause we've known each other a long time, way back right? Yeah, because I have known you forever.

ELAINE VAN BERGEN:  Yeah, and they had great ways where they'd explain a lot of that to, to the team and to the employees. So we always knew like, you know, how much, how you make money in consulting. And I always knew that pretty much a month before financial year ends every year I want to quit because you do, it's just so busy. But I guess when you get taught and you know, learn about how the business actually works, it's, I think that's a lot, lot easier to cope with. I, yeah, I didn't mind the, the pressure. I quite liked that, that piece of it for consulting. But I do with startup stuff, I live vicariously through, um, some things that I do like, um, SheEO, which is, um, an organization where, where they preach radical generosity to, um, to start ups. So essentially what you do as a activator, which is what I am, is we give, um, $1,100 a year and it's not like an investment. You just give the money and then you get to vote from a bunch of female led startups that are all trying to change the world to work on the world's to do list and you vote for who's going to be the winners of that. And then the people that get through the final, they, they get together, the women running the businesses and they decide how to divide up what's a five year loan. Um, and yeah, it's been running in Canada for quite a few years.

HEATHER NEWMAN:   What's it called again?

ELAINE VAN BERGEN:  She-E-O. And so it's super cool cause you just meet so many amazing women running businesses and all the things they're solving and all that kind of thing. And then you can still, you know, obviously even if they're not finalists, you get connected with all these people, see what they're doing, their businesses. It's amazing. Um, and so far everyone's paid back the money over those five year terms and then it becomes in Canada cause it's been running long enough, essentially a perpetual fund now. In Australia, it's only been running for, this is its second year.

HEATHER NEWMAN:   That's so cool. Um, with, with the healthcare stuff, do you find that, are you working mostly with like the IT admin or are you, you know, you said you work with a bunch of different people, but is there like sort of one scenario that sticks out to you most?

ELAINE VAN BERGEN:  If we were working purely with it, I would flag it as an issue.

HEATHER NEWMAN:   Fair enough. Right?

ELAINE VAN BERGEN:  Yeah. Yeah. And that, yeah, there's always, I mean, you do have to be very careful about, um, we were doing something recently where some ER surgeons were involved and they're pretty busy people. They've got really important lives to save. So you know, they're not going to turn up to every meeting and you have to be very careful with their time. But typically there's always some actual what you'd call business users, involved. Particularly anything, you know, it's changing management 101 with AI, machine learning, those kinds of things. You have to get people involved early, make sure they understand what you're doing, why you're doing it, and they have a big say in the design because we're building it for, for them.

HEATHER NEWMAN:   Yeah, absolutely. I was recently at the doctor and I was um, for some routine stuff, and I always, you know, I'm sure you do this too, whenever you're anywhere, you always like peek around to see what version of like the cash register, or you know, the monitor in your doctor's office or whatever. And I'm, I'm, and that was something with HIMSS too, in a way that I felt like, you know, with healthcare, because I worked doing some cybersecurity stuff for a bit and that's why I went to HIMSS and like it, it seemed to me that healthcare, financial services, utilities, those three were seemingly to me, my own personal opinion, a little bit more behind.

ELAINE VAN BERGEN:  Absolutely. Yeah. There's so much that happens in healthcare still with paper even. Um, and that's why some, some scenarios where we're doing amazing things with data and analyzing it or looking at x-rays or whatever. But then, yeah, a lot of those, hey, just provide a PowerApps form where someone can actually type a reading. Um, say for example, the recent project we did was around collecting point of care testing and getting it into Azure and then doing some results off it. Because what often happens is someone will go and take a patient's test results, write it on a bit of paper, then go over type it into the machine that it goes into. Sometimes they are direct connected, but sometimes they're not. And in this case, we've just, um, you know, sort of hooked up these five point of care testing devices to a particular IOT hub that then can communicate securely. But that also means not only the results actually going into, there's no typing errors or writing errors, but then in, in this case, we're using it to help predict the risk of sepsis for that patient. And then we can send a notification through to the clinician to say if the patient is medium or high likelihood that they should then run a bunch of other tests. Whereas in the past, you kind of, the doctor would have to go and check a screen for some of that. And that's a fairly simple scenario, right. Um, but you know, it's just gone into seven pathology centers in, in new South Wales, and then hopefully it will roll out further and could end up saving lives. Which is an amazing scenario.

HEATHER NEWMAN:   Yeah. Yeah. And I wonder, will they, will they sort of pilot that and that'll become the standard way to do whatever's going to be next.

ELAINE VAN BERGEN:  Yeah. Yeah. So it started with sepsis because it's a relatively easy model, so it doesn't require a huge amount of computation. And you know, is a nice scenario because it is also the leading killer of most people. So yeah, it's a really impactful one, but not hugely technically complex. And now they've, they've piloted in these pathology centers, you can ramp up to a whole bunch more so that, yeah, that was sort of part of Satya's, um, keynote presentation when he was in Australia.

HEATHER NEWMAN:   Oh, that's so cool. Yeah, I just, I find the health care industry super fascinating and like I, I was again, the doctor thing I did, uh, um, I'm with, uh, I won't say any actual names of healthcare providers, but I have one that I pay for and um, thank you Affordable Care Act, um, in the United States and I, uh, there's, uh, around the West coast, that particular provider is in Washington state, Oregon, California and Hawaii. And great. Well, I'm in Southern California dealio, I used to live in Northern California, so I have a Southern California number, medical ID, I have an NorCal ID number. I went up to Washington and I had to deal with this molar that I got pulled out of my face and, and I've got a Washington state number and when I lived in Hawaii, I have a Hawaiian number. Now my medical records do not.

ELAINE VAN BERGEN:  Yeah. They're not synced between all of that.

HEATHER NEWMAN:   Yeah. What the heck?

ELAINE VAN BERGEN:  Yeah, it's very common. And um, yeah, and you know, of course it doesn't matter when you're young and really healthy, but, but.

HEATHER NEWMAN:   When you don't care and you're like, where were the, who was the doctor anyway, right? Yeah.

ELAINE VAN BERGEN:  Yeah. There's a lot of things that get, get missed not through any fault of the clinicians, but where somebody's had maybe an allergy to a medication at one place. And because those records aren't synced, they've got no idea. And if they can't tell people, it can cause real, real issues. So, yeah, creating a unified electronical medical records very, very popular. And even just, I mean your experience was probably also a lot of waiting, right? Like how much time did you actually spend waiting or on the phone or booking appointments versus the actual medical care?

HEATHER NEWMAN:  Yeah, no, I mean there was, when I'm in my area, I can use my app. I can do my, you know, prescription, all that kind of jazz. But they have this visiting thing that's kind of cool. You know, if you're on assignment or whatever, you can use it, but you have to call, you have to figure out if you can get, you know, labs moved over there or you have to go get a new doctor and you know, if you have routine labs. It was just, it's just fascinating to me that like we're so we can save lives and are wonderful at that kind of thing. But just like literally tracking, you know, that like I've, I've gotten the rubella immunization or whatever, you know, and keeping, like I literally, I took a picture of my medical records in two different places and I brought him to the new doctor and like, cause I was just like, Oh my God! This is bananas. Right. 

HEATHER NEWMAN:  Do you find that, uh, when you're working, you know, with the hospitals, like, do you ever, like, are you going to them or is it all on like your mostly stuff online or,

ELAINE VAN BERGEN:  Yeah, well, yeah, it, it, it depends. Um, yeah, lots of IT departments of hospitals are actually in the hospital. Usually in some poor little basement. Because they're not, patients are more important than the IT staff. Right. So um,

HEATHER NEWMAN:   That's hilarious that they're down in the middle of nowhere.

ELAINE VAN BERGEN:  Yeah. I can be, can be like that. Um, with new South Wales health pathology, they have the best location ever cause they're actually part of a government department. But they, they live in a place called Newcastle where from their office you can see and walk to the beach.

HEATHER NEWMAN:  Okay. That does not stink at all.

ELAINE VAN BERGEN:  They have an amazing work environment.

HEATHER NEWMAN:   That's awesome. What were you presenting here on?

ELAINE VAN BERGEN:  Building better bots.

HEATHER NEWMAN:   Say that again cause it's so fun listening to you say that.

ELAINE VAN BERGEN:  Building better bots.

HEATHER NEWMAN:   Better bots, that's fantastic. Okay. So talk to us about that. Tell everybody about that a little bit.

ELAINE VAN BERGEN:  Yeah, I find with a lot of conversations I get into, people want bots and they haven't really thought through whether the bots are actually going to be useful for their users. So,

HEATHER NEWMAN:  Not everybody is a techie, so tell everybody what a bot is and what that means to you.

ELAINE VAN BERGEN:  Really, a bot is anything that you tend to chat to in an interface. And so you will have seen some of the very annoying ones when you go to the website and a little picture pops up and it says, can I help you? Those kind of thing, right. Yeah. And so part of what I talk about is that bots shouldn't pretend to be humans. They should just be a bot. Because as an end user, if you know something's a bot, you're not expecting it to respond like a human. So you tend to be a bit more forgiving if it can't do everything, which it won't be able to do everything. But also it should do something, it should do something quicker, easier, faster for a person.

HEATHER NEWMAN:  Right. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. That's cool. And how does that, does that, how did you come up with that? Does it relate to like other bots that you're recommending for?

ELAINE VAN BERGEN:  Yeah, well it's come up a lot, there's been a lot of conversations, um, in various customers that I've been involved with. And with bots in healthcare, there's, there's then a whole ethical part on top around should it be a bot or if it's a bot, how do we make sure that it can escalate to a human? And we do actually have responsible bot guidelines at Microsoft. So some of the talk has come from that to say if you, you know, firstly people come and say, I want to build a bot and it's going to do like patient triage or something. Like don't start there. Right. I mean, it sounds silly. We all should know this, but it's amazing how, how often people go, you know, the IT director said we need a bot. Can we do it for this human critical task? Let's walk a bit first. Let's run later.

HEATHER NEWMAN:  That makes so much sense. That's so interesting. Um, so with grow, have you lived anywhere else?

ELAINE VAN BERGEN:  I was born in the UK, but I moved to Australia when I was five. So not that I can really remember living anywhere else for this. I’ve always been in Melbourne and it's so fantastic in Melbourne. I don't know that I'll ever live anywhere else.

HEATHER NEWMAN:  It is fantastic in Melbourne. I really enjoyed it too. You know, people would do the whole Sydney, Sydney, Sydney, and you know, it's lovely and there's the opera house, but Melbourne's got a great feel to it. It's just, yeah,

ELAINE VAN BERGEN:  It's just a bit more chilled and there's great food and yeah, Sydney does have the amazing tourist attractions. I always tell people they should, they should go there. Um, but yeah, I love, love Melbourne. Um, I do love visiting other places, just not where I want to live somewhere else

HEATHER NEWMAN:  Completely. And do you tend to see, uh, the, the community there, so we talk a lot about our community and MVPs and you know, other, you know, all of that. Do you, uh, do you hang out with, you know, that community as well and is it pretty big in Australia there?

ELAINE VAN BERGEN:  Yeah, well, luckily because I was MVP for so long before I was joined Microsoft, they still let me hang out with them. They haven't shunned me for joining the blue mothership. Yeah, no, we still, it is a really nice friendly community. So, um, now there's some user groups that run. Now I don't, I don't think it's um, uh, always a good idea if Microsoft runs a user group, I think it's better if it's run by the community itself. And now instead of the user groups that I used to run, I will be the person that helps them host it at Microsoft because they need a full time employee to get the venue. That also means I get to hang out with everyone and chat and help with different events. Um, I think we've got Ignite the Tour coming up in, in February, which I'll go to and hang out with all the local folks.

HEATHER NEWMAN:  That's super cool. Yeah. I love, I, every time I see you and we, when we have talked or I see you doing something, you are the epitome to me of somebody who loves what they do.

ELAINE VAN BERGEN:  I do.

HEATHER NEWMAN:   And it's, it's, so, it's, that's not, it's rare.

ELAINE VAN BERGEN:  Yeah. And it's not to say, you know, some people think that everyday must be awesome. I'm like, well, no, no, no, no, there are definitely some hard days. Um, yeah, I mean I went to Boston for three days. It was awesome because it was the first time I met any of my teammates in person. So I love the time I was there. But boy did the jet lag kick in when I got home. There was some hard days. Yeah. So, every day is, is not amazing. But yeah, I get to use cool technology. I get to help people learn how to do that. And occasionally some of those projects will maybe save some lives or change some lives.

HEATHER NEWMAN:   Absolutely. Changing the world every day.

ELAINE VAN BERGEN:  It's amazing.

HEATHER NEWMAN:   That's pretty cool.

ELAINE VAN BERGEN:  I can't believe it's a job.

HEATHER NEWMAN:   I know, you always have that same look on your face. I'm always like, she loves what she does. It's so cool. So, um, last question or comment, um, I always talk to people about sparks or people and, uh, things or happenings in their lives that sort of really got you to where you are today. Is there something you can share with our listeners about that?

ELAINE VAN BERGEN:  Um, uh, one of the things that really got me here was being part of that, that Nintex journey. Even though I was sort of a very small part of, um, one, some of the teams that, that built that product, but you know, like being part of a team that wrote some code and did some testing or whatever, and then we'd suddenly get calls and it's like, Oh, Boeing's using it or this massive company. And we're this little company of a few people down in Australia. But yeah, I mean that, that was amazing to see how far you could go with IT. But also the fact that the guys that run that company will always very good at sharing how it'll work. Like it wasn't magic. So you know, I still use heaps of stuff I learned from back then in my everyday cause I understand how business actually works.

HEATHER NEWMAN:   Yeah, absolutely. And such good people.

ELAINE VAN BERGEN:  They're really good.

HEATHER NEWMAN:   Yeah. And it is, I think, I think I onboarded OBS and Nintex into the SharePoint partner ecosystem, back in the day, you know, it was one of those, cause they were a little bit later than some of the first partners.

HEATHER NEWMAN:   So yeah. That's cool. And that's what got me connected with everyone that's here. Right. It just went on from, from there.

HEATHER NEWMAN:   Some of those first jobs where you get to see the growth of a company from start to finish. Really do. Yeah. Stick with you. That's cool. That makes a lot of sense.

ELAINE VAN BERGEN:  I mean, I've also, you know, my, my first ever manager, which was actually the job before that, um, Andy Newman is still a good mate of mine as well. So, you know, just those people that you meet and yeah, they're amazing. Amazing at what they do and inspire me.

HEATHER NEWMAN:   And you lift each other up. That's awesome. I'm so happy we finally, we've been trying to do this for a little while, so I'm so happy we got to do it here. It's a delight to talk to you. And I really, every time I see you, y'all, she has this beautiful smile on her face. You look happy all the time, and I don't mean to be like, and I know we all have our moments of not happy, but I really, you're somebody that I always look at and I go, Oh, it's cool that you really love what you do. And I, and it's, and it's one of those things that I think we all can aspire to.

HEATHER NEWMAN:   Thank you very much. Yeah. Always lovely to chat.

HEATHER NEWMAN:   Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for being on the show.

HEATHER NEWMAN:   Thank you very much.

HEATHER NEWMAN:   Awesome. Well everybody, that was another Mavens Do It Better podcast. And you can catch us on the various places on the interwebs. And here's to another big beautiful day on this blue spinning sphere.

Episode 59: Greg Frick Tech Maven

Transcript

Heather Newman:  Hello everyone. Here we are for another episode of the Mavens Do It Better podcast where we interview extraordinary experts who bring a light to our world where we talk about technology, we talk about brand, we talk about what sparks people to be and do all the things that they are in the world. And I am here with Greg Frick from Zones who I've known a long time and we're sitting here. Where are we, Greg? Tell everybody. 

Greg Frick:  We're in Orlando, Florida at Ignite. Ignite 2019. 

Heather Newman:  Absolutely. And we just stepped into the podcasting center in community central in the hub. And, uh, I had booked this time and I hadn't really planned a guest. I thought, I'm going to book a time and funnily, you didn't even know this, but like magically I was like, you know what, I'm probably going to like talk to somebody and you said such amazing things when we were having our conversation out front and I was like, Hey, want to do a podcast about what we were talking about, so serendipity. Isn't that funny? 

Greg Frick:  It is funny. It's perfect. It's perfect. 

Heather Newman:  Absolutely. So yeah, and uh, what's great here at Ignite is they have this whole podcasting center. And uh, what also happened is we came in and I'm using a 4 HN Pro Zoom, uh, which I record on all the time. And I usually am not super fancy, I'm getting fancier. Um, but I usually just pop the record button on and you know, Greg was watching this whole transaction and we have this beautiful audio techs here and we're looking at this great equipment. Julius and Jim were like, well, if you let me plug in some stuff, I can make you sound a whole lot better. And I dunno. How do you feel on these fancy? 

Greg Frick:  Oh, I'm completely loving them. The sound is awesome. 

Heather Newman:  So yeah, we feel like we're on NPR, so absolutely. 

Greg Frick:  Absolutely. I listen to a lot of radio in my car. And this is that same sort of intimate, nice tone. 

Heather Newman:  That's awesome. That's awesome. Um, so we were chatting outside about, gosh, we were chatting outside about life. We were chatting outside about technology. Um, will you tell everybody a little bit about, let's talk about Zones for a second and what you do or, and sort of how you got to that place in your life for work. 

Greg Frick:  Oh, I'm a senior solution engineer at Zone. So I work on customer projects in the M365 space. So it could be things like migrations, it could be modern intranet, it could be Team's adoption. It could be any of those kind of issues that people are looking at. Um, it all, it sometimes bleeds into security, bleeds into, you know, Office 365 settings and governance and ways to keep your environment safe. So that's what I'm doing currently. Currently. Yes, that's my, my current gig. And uh, it's been, it's been a great experience. The company values training and that was one of the things is a meta value to that. I went in and they had like, you know, a week of training and it wasn't really relevant to my job, but the meta experience was that when you're being onboarded and you see an organization that has invested in teaching and learning and passing along the message, there's professionals and they're updating content and they're going to get a message across with the, you know, we're always learning, right? And so whether we're learning the exact content or we're learning because of the environment we're in, you know, we're always learning. And so I value that about the organization and looking forward to that journey wherever it takes me. 

Heather Newman:  I know I was, we were talking outside and you said a couple of things that I just was like, Oh, love it. And one, I use that hashtag always learning all the time, first of all. And you just said that twice, which is kind of awesome. And then we were talking a little bit about adoption and we were talking about the, the um, the "IT of no", which I thought was really interesting and I was like, I want you to write a blog post about that, but maybe could you talk about that a little bit? I love that comment. 

Greg Frick:  The "IT of no" is, I mean, my belief is that people are constantly making risk reward calculations. And I think in IT sometimes, especially in the cloud where things are so rapidly changing that if IT isn't resourced properly, then it's so much, and this has always been true in IT, right? It's a lot of times it's easier to say no and stop the deployment or the rollout or, you know, try to figure out and, and that can take your energy away, right? So if you're in an organization and you're trying to develop a solution or you're trying to move forward with your business and you want to, there's something you need to do or something that you want to try even. And then it runs into the wall. I think when Microsoft does the citizen developer stuff and the power platform and things like that, and before that InfoPath and SharePoint designer workflows, the idea was people that are engaged and interested in creative, they're creators, right? So they're getting energy from the fact that they are in an environment and their expertise and they can focus on a business solution that can deliver value to their organization at the same time. And I think this is really important, they experience growth and fulfillment, right? It's fulfilling and validating their, their special talents. And so when it, when the brakes get put on everything, not only do you not get that application and you can have a long conversation about, well, these citizen developed applications aren't governable. You can have that conversation and you should. But you also have that effect of training your employees that if they want to innovate or try something new, they're not going to be able to. And then if you get trained that a number of times you don't try anymore. 

Heather Newman:  Yeah. You get shot down enough, you stop trying. Right? 

Greg Frick:  Yeah. 

Heather Newman:  I mean it's, it's like you pop the balloon, it's like, all right, well the party's over and why should I even do this again? Yeah. I think that's an interesting thing with, you know, all the talk around adoption and training is that there's so many customers and that I've seen as well that, you know, they'll get an initiative started and then the person that's the champion, the one champion, they leave, they move on, they get frustrated or whatever and then the whole thing falls apart. You know? So to me a lot of the times talking about that, it's like, that's why you have more of a team collaboration when you're trying to do adoption or when you're trying to push or roll something out. And it can't just be all one person holding the cards, you know. 

Greg Frick:  So, the other place I went in our conversation out front was about improv and the relationship between improv and teamwork. It completely connects to these topics that we're, we're, we're discussing because in this, this idea of like that one person leaving and then the initiative sort of petering out losing energy. I mean I've experienced that too. I was involved with setting up communities of practice at the university of Washington and. 

Heather Newman:  sure, I'm a Husky. Go Huskies. 

Greg Frick:  Yes, you are a Husky, Go Huskies. And uh, and it was, it was great to work there and it was great to have the opportunity to do that. And we were all, I was also on a community of practice, community of practice. Like we were looking at finding ways to support and grow communities of practice. There is this idea that if there isn't that sort of one person pushing and driving that they'll peter out, cause there's this idealistic idea that I'll just launch the ship and it will carry on on its own. But it needs to be a need and it needs an energy input. It needs to be okay. It needs to be valued, I think. The segway I was going to make with improv was this concept of an ensemble. And so in some of the improv books that I've been reading, the most recent one is The Art of Is by Stephen Nachmanovitch. There's this concept of a, of an ensemble. So he's a musician. So he's talking about improv also in the context of making music. And so the thing that gets created in an ensemble is a product of all the people in the ensemble. And that's part of the culture. And that's what people negotiate and learn. If you're in a musical group and you don't learn to work with your ensemble, you might not be in that music group for long. And we even see, you know, like if you ever watch the Muppets, you know, you've seen Animal going nuts on the drum, right? He like goes Animal goes into his own thing and he's not part of the group anymore. So jazz. If you watch jazz, I mean people do a little head nod, it passes off to the other musician and they're, they're playing together, they're, they're working, they're connecting their music to what the other musicians are doing. 

Heather Newman:  It's improvisation. But, but improvisation is about like the energy and the beats in the room. You're riffing off each other and right? 

Greg Frick:  You are saying yes, you're saying yes. So you go nuts on your guitar, Heather, why don't you bring your guitar up? I'm listening to that. I'm gonna take that as an offer and I'm going to say yes and then I'm going to contribute what I have to contribute. And then like comedy or theatrical improv, there's that concept too of saying yes and. And a lot of people have read this because it's been all over. It's in the, you can just Google it. It's going to be an articles in Forbes, it's going to be an HPR. It's all around us. And the practice of it is this sort of exercising these muscles of saying yes and then we can do that. We, we had two of those experiences this morning. Right now I'm walking through the hall, I want to go to see what's new with private channels. I see Heather Newman and I say, Hey, Heather Newman, and we start a little conversation and then that conversation had full eye contact and personal connection and Heather said, do you want to go and do a podcast? Would you like to talk about that? And so, now sometimes I'm very much aware of my, no, that's okay. I don't want to be a bother or let someone else, there's a way that, you know, you have that sort of resistance. And I, and I wasn't we, maybe it's because we'd had a good conversation leading up to it, but I just said, yes, I will do this. I don't know what I will say. But if we're going to talk about teamwork and engagement and improv and personal growth and humans and humanity in IT, and what engagement is, and when it's a spark, you know, then yeah, we can have a podcast and I don't have to know what's going to come out of my mouth because I've thought about this so much and talk to so many people. I'm Very much energized about it. 

Heather Newman:  Yeah, absolutely. No, it's pretty, it's pretty cool. You know, I was a theater major at the university of Washington. So yeah. So the thought of improv and ensemble to me is huge because you know, people are always, a lot of people are like you a theater major and they're like, I'm not surprised that you were a theater major, but they're, but they go, huh, technology. And I go, yeah. The thing is is that I honestly always have approached everything like I am in a play because I've been a director, a playwright, and an actor and it is like even looking at something like Ignite, right? Your speakers are your actors. There's people who are producers who help pay for it, which are our sponsors. You've got the directors, people who run the show. We've got sets around us, lights, we've got this beautiful equipment around us. So like to me it's like, and the audience are the attendees without one of those parts, this doesn't work. Right? And so every honestly, like that's how I approach and have approached business working at Microsoft my entire career because that's where I come from. 

Greg Frick:  You would love the Applied Improv. There's a, there's a network called the Applied Improv Network, it's AIN. The conference last year was in Stony Brook, New York. I attended that. So when I, you know, I told you I went to improv camp. Well, when I was on their Facebook group, I learned from Erica Marks, um, amazing woman, generous woman as well. So, she said, Oh, well here's this Applied Improv Network conference. I went to their, their conference in Stonybrook and one of the themes was we're always on stage, and, and as I was sharing too, this is a related idea, but as I was sharing on that Facebook group about being a little nervous, like I don't, I'm not an improv performer. I haven't gotten on stage. I've stood up in front of groups and I kind of like it, I've kind of rift that way, but I haven't done like comedy improv. So, I thought, Oh everybody else will. And so I was kind of, I felt that sort of uncomfortable fear, nervous thing as I was posting on the Facebook group. And I said, yeah, but one person said, well, just kind of reframed it as not what's going to happen when I go there, but what I'm going to bring to it, like I have an opportunity when I go to that conference to show up with my full self. Sometimes I joke around and I said, bring my full Greg-ness, you know, with me. I was like, Oh yeah, so, and that was a good switch. That changes. That's just the emotional experience of being from what's going to happen, I'm nervous to I get to bring, you know, I get to, I get to give something, right? How many times do, if someone asks you for help, do you say yes and then when you need help, do you have a hard time asking? It seems kind of natural and, but it doesn't work without the, one doesn't work with the other. So, you know, going out and trying to be a full participant in that conference and the idea that we're always on the, that I'm making the connection between that idea. You've been bringing this through your whole career of, you know, theater and onstage and communication and you're creating an experience. It's not like you're not there. It also leads a lot of empathy because you're also, um, allowing yourself to experience possibilities. Like if you grew up with a narrative and a story that you're this kind of a person that does this kind of stuff, but then you play a character that does something different. Now you just expanded yourself and now you're not just that kind of person. The possibility for you being other kinds of people, whatever those stories are, starts to expand and open up. 

Heather Newman:  you just said so many things that like you're going to make me a little misty, like seriously. Cause it's, it's, so you've said it so eloquently, you know, it's, it's interesting too, I'm sitting here looking at you and behind you are all of these, uh, we're right behind the global D&I, you know, the diversity and inclusion booth with all these people and talking about empathy and all of that. And you know, to me theater is empathy, right? If we can walk a mile in somebody's shoes, we can see somebody's story on stage, we can understand them, understand the world, start with ourselves with changing a little bit about how we think about things. And you and I were talking about that a little bit about how, you know, if, if like our own biases about different things when we're, you know, talking to someone and it's like, how do we look at things in a different way? There was a, um, a tweet that, I think it was Sonya Cuff that put it out. It was about someone had come up to a booth and sort of made an assumption that the gal at the booth, you know, didn't, wouldn't be able to answer the technical questions. And it spawned this huge like, you know, um, long tweet chain. And I think it's all about where we're working on changing our perceptions of how, what our biases are and what we assume, you know, and all of that. And I think that's, that begins with a lot of that empathy of being able to see something through somebody else's eyes. And we don't always think about that. We just think it's the world is our frame, our own frame of reference. And people are just like us. People are so not just like us. Have you, have you experienced some of the stuff in the Humans of IT? And have you gone to any of the sessions? 

Greg Frick:  I have. I signed up for Humans of IT and I found, I mean it's an interesting conversation because with my, I have a, a long history of, of being in meetings where, um, there's a code of conduct where you don't share personal stories outside of the meeting. That you're creating this safe environment and it's, and it's, and it's a part of the code. So I was having a hard time translating, uh, into, uh, cause the women that we're talking about it were clearly moved by the personal disclosure of other people, right. Because we all are, right. When someone says I'm afraid or I'm scared or I'm at Ignite and I think everybody else knows each other and nobody knows me and I'm all alone. Or universal park. I could've gone dark at universal park. I went there alone. I didn't, I had fun. Then I ended up hooking up with a Christian and I followed on his little crew as we went on ride after, ride after ride until we absolutely couldn't go on any more rides. Um, but I just, you know, it's just a story. And so like when you share that and disclose, you know, personal vulnerability, people do feel closer. And it's true. It's true. Like what's true from me is, you know, like you say, yeah, we are all different. But in one way that we're the same is that we sometimes compare what we feel on the inside to how people look on the outside. Social media is, you know, that's the backlash of social media is everybody looks at social media and they say, wow everybody has perfect lives and they're all happy all the time and they're all at the beach and they, they're all, they're all in love and they have great dogs that can do cool tricks and I don't have any of it, 

Heather Newman:  right. Cause you're comparing your insides to their outsides and their presentation. And so being free of that is super important. And we sort of started our conversation with that and a little bit just sort of catching up and yeah. Made the comments of, you know, about like what you see out there. And I was sharing a little bit about, I was like, yeah, you know, I wrote recently about my own journey through some burnout that I had and shared some personal things with you. Cause I mean, we don't know each other all that well, but I was like, I dunno. Like I, I was like, I like him, I trust him, I'm going to tell him some stuff. You know what I mean? It's like, and, and I think that also, you know, we, we then sort of our, our conversation kind of opened up a little bit more and I was just like, wow, cool. I'm so happy I'm having this conversation with you. You know what I mean? Like truly. And I think it is what you see on social media. You're like, you make an assumption about people's lives, about what they're doing or Oh, they're going here and then doing this and all of that stuff. But you have no idea what they may be going through. You know? And not everybody writes about stuff like I do in particular or talks about issues because I just can't stop doing it, you know? But you know, a lot of people don't have that kind of outlet. And so like one on one conversations when we're at conferences like this or with our friends or kind of what we do or we don't talk about it at all and it gives us some terrible disease because we don't talk about these things, you know, I mean, I don't know. So yeah, I, I just thank you for that. It was really wonderful to like have that moment with you. I was like, let's go talk in the podcast center. Um, but I wanted to talk about, um, tell me, tell me your origin story, if you would like your, like IT, where are you from and all that good stuff. Will you give a little bit of flavor on that? 

Greg Frick:  Yeah. So like if we're doing like a story arc, I um, went to UMass Amherst and I studied anthropology. And so what was, I joked, I was like the closest I could come to studying ology. So, so I, I found that fascinating and I love, you know, and I gave a rap and I used to discount my rap, but I'm finding out that it's actually true and the pitch would be upsetting anthropology because I want to learn about how organizations work and how cultures work and how information is exchanged and how power is exchanged so that I can affect positive social change and, you know, and then I, I, I then went through a period of my life where I discounted that story because I thought, Oh, that was just a story. I was tricking myself thinking that's what I was interested in. Here I am in technology now many years later. And so I'll fill in that arc a little bit more. But just to jump from here to there now I find myself fascinated by when we talk about teamwork, you know, like one of the things that I've found motivating is, uh, that maybe I can help someone else realize their potential. Like I can re, uh, recognize or elevate people by saying, Hey, wow, you're really smart. That was a great solution. I didn't think of that. But you thought of that and have this sort of way of like enjoying the experience of, you know, being in technology but having people be more fulfilled and be validated for sort of their unique gifts and their skills. Right. Because it does take someone who's tenacious and creative and innovative and interested and energized to kind of dig into this like, so if someone is, you know, an administrative assistant and they say, I think I can do that in power apps. And then they spend their time on the online videos and find a way and then they get a, you know, they, they find a way to do it and then they bring all this value, their perspective of their organization. So they experienced this trajectory. So I find it satisfying to be a part of that. So, so that also ties into teamwork and how do we work together. I haven't been on as many teams as I'd like, where at the end of the year we all look at each other and go, Oh my God, we did that. Right, right. That experience of being so much better than I am as an individual because of the team. And that's that elusive draw of like teamwork. And I find Microsoft Teams appealing because it's a platform in which some of that can happen, that the product is technology and the way that it happens is people. And so I find that, Oh, I'm back to that thing with the, Oh, studying the way organizations work and how communication flows and how power is distributed and how that affects other people, that dynamic. That's also true in platforms and collaboration platforms as well. So I, uh, I didn't get a high paying anthropology job after I left University of Massachusetts. I didn't actually even, uh, graduate, but I, I was interested in social issues. So I worked for Mass Perk for a few years and then I worked for, uh, a campaign on national healthcare. And a lot of that was outward stuff where I was talking to strangers and asking them to listen or to buy into an idea. And so then I, I thought, okay, I need to get into, uh, get a real job. That's what I was thinking. That was the dialogue, right. Cause whatever, because that's. 

Heather Newman:  I did the same thing. I have theater. It was like I had my day job, my theater and then the real job, you know? Yeah. 

Greg Frick:  So, I got into computers many, many years ago. Leading Edge was one of the computer companies I worked for. Another company was a Mosaic, which made a clone of Lotus 123. A lot of listeners might not know what Lotus 123 was, but it defined, it was why people bought PCs back in the 80s. They wanted to use Lotus 123. And uh, and so I went to Comdex in 1986 and then I've had this sort of career in Massachusetts working in IT. I was a Novell administrator. I was into, when I discovered the internet, I thought it was amazing. And uh, and I set up web servers and got into web and I was a webmaster for a startup in Massachusetts. And, uh, when I was a webmaster, I got intoxicated by directories because the idea of having to log into different systems was stupid. That's what it used to be. There is like a login on this one, in a login on this one, and you had to remember all of them. Then it was all in the same company. And so I, I ended up getting into directory services and ended up by, uh, got a job at Siemens in their fledgling a networking communications group. And that was when they saw the writing on the wall about converged voice and stuff. And so, but then I thought life must mean more. And I took a couple of years off and I lived in, uh, uh, uh, Korean Zen temple and near Boston college and studied Shim Gum Do, which is, uh, uh, martial arts, which is with a sword. Uh, so mind sword path, that was a fencer. So I liked the swords anyway. So, and then, uh, after that I was running out of money, so I volunteered at a Tibetan Buddhist temple in Northern California and I helped build the Chintamani temple at Odeon. You can Google it. 

Heather Newman:  Where is that exactly? 

Greg Frick:  It's in Northern California, the mailing address is Cazadero but if you're going up route one, it's seven miles in on from Stewart's point. 

Heather Newman:  I lived in Sebastopol for a long time. 

Greg Frick:  Okay. Yeah, that's the area. 

Heather Newman:  I know where that is. I was like, wow. 

Greg Frick:  So, I volunteered there. So, so yeah, and my suggestion to listeners is don't get into construction when you turn 40. 

Heather Newman:  It's painful. 

Greg Frick:  It is, you know, it's like you're not working on a bench. Everything's, you're on your back or you're stretched out. It's painful. So then I, that when I finished that volunteer commitment, my brother said, why don't you live with me in Seattle? And so I moved in with my brother and then I found myself needing to get back into IT. And I got back into IT by way of, uh, being a trainer and I, I found SharePoint and SharePoint was a validation of all the other stuff I did with, you know, web and intranets and communications and, and, and I loved SharePoint. And so I stayed in the SharePoint realm and that's how we came to meet within the SharePoint realm. So I think everybody in, there's a lot of people in SharePoint that have stories like that. Yours is this probably like that. 

Heather Newman:  Oh yeah. Mine is a theater connection. So Nancy McSherry Jensen. 

Greg Frick:  I don't know who that is. 

Heather Newman:  She was the first group product manager for SharePoint back in 2001. She's married to Andy Jensen who I went to theater school with. And I was doing arts marketing in Seattle for open circle theater and a bunch of other theaters. My own theater. Grecks, I had a theater company. Um, and yeah, I got laid off from a job. I was working at an engineering firm that made digital camera parts that went on Fuji and Kodak, you know, those things that were actually cameras and digital cameras, not our on our phones, with film. So, um, they did like, they added pieces to them. And uh, so yeah, I got laid off from that job and was looking for something and he was like, Hey, you're doing all this great marketing for the arts. You should talk to Nancy. She's running this like new kind of startup thing at Microsoft that, you know, brand new. And I was like, okay. So I went and we talked and um, she needed somebody to write the first, write and produce the first 150 case studies for this thing called SharePoint. And she, it was, they were still calling it Tahoe at the time too. So it was SharePoint portal server, SharePoint team services. And I, we talked and she gave me the job and I said like you were talking about saying yes, I was 20 or 30, 29 at the time. And I just kept saying yes, you know, she would say, do you know how to put together a partner book and blah, blah, blah and do you know how to do this and do that? And I mean, I had no idea what I was doing, you know, I mean I'd always been a producer and so putting things together, that ensemble thing, totally, you know, like I can do it. And I learned and I mean I, I just kept saying yes, you know, and then that's when it diverted. But when we share point conference, that was an idea. I talked to Jeff Teper about that this week actually about that first one and deciding to do that event and asking Mr. Gates to be our keynote and stuff. And these were all just like ideas that we all had of like should we do this? And then Heather, Hey, call up this literally handed a piece of paper. There's 60 partner names on this list. Go call them because we need a SharePoint ecosystem and we need partners to validate the product that they're using it and building on it. Go call them. Like, so that was my entre neu and I, I've said yes for 18 years in various, in different ways as a full time, a vendor consultant, a partner now and MVP. So yeah, like it's the power of going, hi SharePoint and SharePoint, The community of SharePoint is just massive and also so strong. I mean you've probably have friends all over there, all over the place too from that. 

Greg Frick:  It is amazing. And the generosity is amazing when you think about like if you're at work, sometimes you write an email and you'll look at your watch and you just spend an hour writing an email. Well now think about all these people that are doing things in SharePoint and they're publishing these amazing blog posts with instructions and screenshots. And then they respond to comments. The gift of that contribution is amazing. And so there are so many people that have done that in the community and there's, I had an experience where I, in my last job, it wasn't going so great. I wasn't getting along with my manager and I was feeling kind of tapped out. Well I'd been the president of the Puget Sound SharePoint User Group for years. And so I was at this Office 365 Saturday, and I told people when they said, how are you doing? I told them like in the past, I might've said at different times, Oh fine. 

Heather Newman:  You see you went into your high voice. 

Greg Frick:  I did. Oh fine. 

Heather Newman:  I do the same thing. It's a tell when we're lying. 

Greg Frick:  Yeah. 

Heather Newman:  We go up here, it's all good, yeah. 

Greg Frick:  Yeah, it's great. It's great. 

Heather Newman:  Yeah, we gotta stay down here, it's great. 

Greg Frick:  Living the dream. So yeah. Oh, uh, so I told people what was going on and uh, it was amazing. People's eyes softened and then they said that they saw me. So people said things like, no, but you know, they comparing me as the guy up in the front of the room, you know, hosting the meetings and creating the space and, and people that, some of the people I've talked to had been in my training classes and one person said, no, you're really good at this stuff. And just stuff that, you know, we don't, we don't always get the luxury of hearing all the positive stuff all the time. As I was describing my challenges, I was getting a lot of positive encouragement and feedback. And then I left that. Uh, so I got the sessions that I went to at that Office 365 Saturday that were great and I learned something, but even more importantly was the connection to the community and that sense that I was seen and heard and valued. And that's the thing that I think as human beings that we want, we want to be, and I say that, you know, I said that in my session at the Office 365 meetup last month was like, yeah, we just want to be loved. We want to belong and we want to be valued. You know, and uh, well, you know, and that's where I think engagement comes from. You know, we're not always going to get a hug or we don't want it disingenuous either. We want it, we know the difference, right. When our, when people's eyes soften and then you see them as a person and you realize that you weren't seeing them as a person. Maybe you were in your co, I get into a cocktail party mode. Like if I'm in a social event, like with a community, I can be like, I have to talk to everybody for 30 seconds, right? 

Heather Newman:  Yes. The handshake and hello. Yeah. 

Greg Frick:  And then, but when you make that connection and it's real and it's like, Oh wait, no, I don't know. I mean it's that's so valuable. It defies time. Right. Cause we, we get into productivity. Early in my technical career I found myself being challenged by communications with other people. Then I realized that what had happened is the computer technology that I working had influenced the way I was looking at the world. So I was almost interacting with people at work, like doing a handshake ack-knack and then saying ready to transmit. And then then when they acknowledged, I would then give them the data and then I would close the connection and walk off maybe a check some or no, I wouldn't necessarily even know if it was valid. Right. That the packet had been received and that was like, that's not the way humans work. And I studied anthropology, so I know there are tribes where it's a long ritual of how's your mother, how's your father, how are you children? Like where you ask about everybody in the family before you see if you can buy the cow. 

Heather Newman:  Wow. Right, right, right. There's a ritual and protocol to certain things in how you interact with each other. Yeah, I do. You know, I, I'm sometimes I, my, my companies are not brick and mortar. You know, HQ is my place, you know, for both of them. And it is hard sometimes, you know, to feel that connection. I think that's why it's great to see people bring their teams to stuff like this cause you get to bond and then us as a community we get to bond and, and all of that. And I really appreciate that cause I do feel disconnected sometimes and I, I love, you know, Karuana was, we were just in her session. 

Greg Frick:  I was just in her session. 

Heather Newman:  Karuana Gatimu who works on the Team's team and does the champions program and so many other things. Who's a good friend and a colleague and you know, talking about like putting on the Team's video, you know, that that we're sort of forcing function of like turning your video on just so we get more of that connection and Teams has made that part of that, the product fun. You know, by giving us the backgrounds and giving us the blurs and, and, and, you know, making it a point to be like, turn your video on, you know, make that connection with people. You know, and we, a bunch of gals and I were on a call, it was early in the morning and I was in a bathrobe cause I, you know, my commute is pretty close, um, to my office and we all decided to turn on our videos and I was like, who is in pajamas? And people are like, uhh, and I was like, everybody's got to put their video on. And we'd like put the video and we had it and we were like, we laughed for a second and we're like, okay, let's get down to business, you know what I mean? And then we'd had our meeting, and they're like, it doesn't matter. It didn't matter that we were, you know, that we weren't made up or had ponytails in or whatever, you know. And I think like that to me is just like amazing and awesome. Like you couldn't do that not that long ago, you know what I mean? And it's also depending on the team and a person and all that. And don't get me wrong, I get gussied and put curlers in my hair and whatnot. 

Greg Frick:  Totally understood and just think about the one that, the thing that stands out is as my observation is that I've seen a lot of meetings where people don't turn their webcams on. And these are meetings where people are trying to do business with each other and they don't turn their webcams on. And I don't think they, I think it's one of these social, like I was talking to someone else, like if you see a piece of litter on the ground, right move. If you see something on the ground, right, there's some worlds that you're in where you will pick it up every single time because it's part of the culture. But if I was in the convention hall and I saw something on the ground, I wouldn't pick it up because you know, part of it is that there are 20 other people just walk by it and they didn't pick it up. And so for me to pick it up is to, to run counter to the tribe and the society and the culture that I'm in. So it's riskier, filled as riskier. And so if we leave, if people don't have any encouragement to turn on their webcams, if they don't learn that, Oh, that's such a, that's 90% of what we do when we communicate with people doesn't happen via our voice. Right. It happens via body language and seeing people and getting a connection. You look at a puzzled face, you give more clarity. You know, uh, and so that picking up that litter is sort of like, wow, we almost need to learn that. You know, think about Burning Man. The message of picking up moop is over and over again. It's in the literature. It's just part of it. You learn it. It's you don't leave matter out of place. You pick it up. 

Heather Newman:  Moop, M O O P. Matter out of place for those of you who haven't been to Burning Man. 

Greg Frick:  But it's not, not part of the rest of our world. So, when I came back from Burning Man, I was like, I picked stuff up and then I stopped because I, I didn't, yeah, I wasn't, I wasn't, I was, it's like being in an elevator. I mean, you turn and face the door. You don't have to. 

Heather Newman:  The, that leave no trace. And also that's, uh, one of the 10 principles of Burning Man. Um, and, uh, uh, Greg has been, I have been, I've talked about this before and so yeah, we were talking about Burning Man a little bit too, and about that sort of, you know, belonging that comes from there. And then sort of the, some of these things that are the principles of, um, Burning Man and yeah, I get it. You know, it's like I walk around here too, and, you know, I do pick things up, but I also, you know, from my event planning days, it's like I just, I can't, I can't see things and stuff. But there's other things that I think we could put in that example. 

Greg Frick:  Absolutely. And that's why I gave it. 

Heather Newman:  Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, it's a great example because it is true. It's like, you know, somebody needs help with a box or something, or somebody dropped something on a subway and their hands are full. You know? It's like, you know, people just like stand there and like look and you're like, okay, the woman obviously, or the man or who, it doesn't matter what gender or whatever, but somebody just dropped something from their hands. Their other hands are full. Get up and pick it up and hand it to them. You know what I mean? Or, and maybe that's not my place to say that and maybe it's okay, maybe that person doesn't want help because sometimes you try to help somebody and they're like, I'm fine and you know, whatever. But you know, it's like, it's one of those things where it's like, 

Greg Frick:  I was trying to make the connection too between the behavior and why we don't turn on our cameras on our webcams, you know? It's like, and I think it's a related, it's similar to why we don't put our profile pictures in Teams. Like in you know, an organization. If there's no pictures, why won't people do that? And it's partly, I think it's because everybody else was walking by that litter and so they walked by it too. In this case it's not litter, it was just nobody else has their pictures in the profile. So they don't, and other people don't turn on their webcams so they don't, then they don't hear that message. So when we think about teams and teams adoption, it's like, yeah, there's really, teams has all the features you can do anything. And when I say that, by the way, I'm just, I'm saying that like the engagement with teams isn't for lack of features or functionality. Engagement with teams is for some other reason. And so it's about maybe we don't have a culture where we share knowledge. Maybe we don't want to talk out loud. Maybe we don't know when to talk one-to-one and when to talk out loud and there's, and so, and if I expand back from that, I like sometimes think like, why do we expect to all work in offices and cubicles and get along? Like, like, I mean humans are great, right? Because we do that on highways, right? Like I look at highways, well, I look at highways and I go, I'm surprised there's not accidents every minute, right? Cause we're driving 2000 pound vehicles within 12 inches of each other. And we kind of get along. Because we have a, there's a set of rules and protocols. We probably have some skin in the game, right? 

Heather Newman:  Right. So, and we don't want our skin on the pavement. 

Greg Frick:  Right, so we can work together. But sometimes it needs to be encouraged and there needs to be creating an environment where that's fertile for it. So my interest in doing the improv and teamwork is partly to help create that fertile environment where people are learning to listen and to experiment and you know, you know, and try things out. And, and where the culture of the organization is understands that before you get great at it, you're not going to be great, right? Like on the way on the journey you, you trip and stumble and make mistakes. So that's a part of it. And that's a, that's a principle of improv is, you know, there's the failure bow where you stand up and spread your arms and say, thank you very much, I made a mistake. You know, and you just acknowledge that you made a mistake because you're a human being and human beings make mistakes. And if you think that they don't, or if you think that nobody else in the room makes mistakes and you're the only one, you know, that separates us now we have to feel like we have to pretend to be something we're not. And how can we, how can we be, how can be fully engaged and fully fulfilled if we're pretending that we're something we're not? And so even in technology, even rolling out teams, even in using SharePoint, even in adoption, even in using Content Panda where it'll tell you what to do all the time in context while you're trying to do a job. Right. You know, and there needs to be a culture of learning, a culture of encouragement and knowing that when you don't know how, that you're, you're learning and that's, and learning looks like you're not doing it very well sometimes. 

Heather Newman:  Yeah. Well it's the quote about, um, not being a know it all but a learn it all. I think that's Satya Nadella, I'm pretty sure. 

Greg Frick:  That's a good one. There's a Buddhist one, which is that similar is like, is, uh, uh, to the, and I'm not going to get it exactly right, but it was, uh, to the beginner there are many possibilities, to the expert there are a few. You know, there's that idea. 

Heather Newman:  I like that. Yeah. That's cool. Um, I think we're going to get kicked out of the room soon. So I want to ask you one last question. If you don't mind. Um, thank you for the conversation by the way it's been so lovely. 

Greg Frick:  Even if we didn't have headphones it would have been fantastic. 

Heather Newman:  I know. Totally. I know, I'm like, yay. Um, so I always ask every guest on the podcast, um, if you would share with the listeners, uh, and one, it can be a couple, but maybe what's the sort of spark or moment or person or thing or place, you know, I'm doing the noun song from, you know, back in when we were kids and, uh, the conjunction junction, you know, um, that, that kinda got you to where you are right now in your life. You know, something that you can be like, ah, this really moved me. Or, or you know, somebody or something, you know. I know it's, it's a hard one, but it's also an, it can be a smattering of things as well. 

Greg Frick:  I mean, if I'm thinking about my, whatever, my DNA, I think that I have to attribute a lot of it to, uh, listening to my parents have conversations. So my parents would have guests over. And as a child I would be in that room just listening. I couldn't get enough of adult conversations. You know, my father read and there was reading going on in my house and, and there was wonderful conversations and I always loved it. So I think engaging with, and if I were to talk, you know, my favorite activities, you know, sometimes it's like, Oh, having good conversations is one of my favorite activities. And I think it's the exchange that happens that you learn, you get challenged, you get acknowledged, you get seen. And so I don't know if that's the kind of answer you're looking for, but I think about like, that's also allows me to then explore ideas. It allows me to, uh, work on how to say things well. I don't mean that, but I mean this and it's hard to fine tune that, right? And kind of experimenting with why, what, you know, why it's, you know, when it feels right. You know, kind of, I guess we're always adjusting our little calibrator right. 

Heather Newman:  Tweaking the button like a DJ. 

Greg Frick:  Yeah. Or like a radio dial. I think About writing like that, it's like turning a radio dial. It's like static, static static. Oh, there's a good station. Static, static static, there's a good station. 

Heather Newman:  I love the visual on that. Yeah. That's awesome. The answer I'm looking for is the answer you gave me. It's cool. I love that. Yeah. 

Greg Frick:  Thank you for asking me to be on your podcast. Do I get to be a Maven now? 

Heather Newman:  Sure. Yeah, absolutely. The expert comment, that's really interesting. You know, the Buddhist quote, I think for me, everybody's an expert, you know, and what they do and what they care about, you know? So it's like, so, yeah. But I'm encouraging people to find their Maven-ness. Like you, like you were talking about your Greg-ness. Like, you know, it's like find your Maven. It's like, what are you passionate about? What's, what are you expert about? What, what, what fills your soul with joy, you know, that's kind of for me, that's the dealio so yeah. Well we are almost to the end of Ignite getting close. Um, after five, five days, five or six, if you were here for the pre day, I'm sitting in that lovely, the lovely podcast center. Um, that I can't wait to hear this cause I'm ma, I'm hoping it just sounds like butter cause our audio we sound so good. 

Greg Frick:  Our audio sounds really good. Listening through this headset with this mic. 

Heather Newman:  I know I told Julius I was going to try and put these in my bag, but I don't think he's going to let me. So anyway, but I'm really what a treat and a serendipitous walk up. Wonderful. Thank you for being on the podcast. It's a delight. 

Greg Frick:  Delight was mine. I get to be on Mavens Do It Better podcast. 

Heather Newman:  So, thank you. Well folks, you've heard it here. That's another episode of the Mavens Do It Better podcast. Uh, and uh, here's to another beautiful day on this big blue spinning sphere. 

Episode 58: Creative Mavens Heather Newman and Annelise Sexton

Heather Newman:  Hello everyone. Here we are again for another episode of the Mavens Do It Better podcast where we interview extraordinary experts who bring a light to our world. We talk to them about what tech they're using, how they promote their personal brands, and a little bit about origin story. Today I am very excited to let you all know that it is our one year anniversary. So, today is Halloween and we launched last year, uh, during Halloween, uh, from New Orleans. And so we thought in order to celebrate that we would do a little podcast about what has been going on for the past year, what technology we use, and also a little bit about the WerkIt 2019 podcast festival that we attended in Los Angeles at the ACE hotel. So my special guest today is none other than Annelise Sexton, who is the producer of the Mavens Do It Better podcast. Hello. Hi Annelise. How are you doing today?

Annelise Sexton:  I am doing pretty good. It's weird being on the other end of a podcast.

Heather Newman:  Yeah. So she, uh, obviously takes care of, uh, the whole back end or maybe not obviously to you, but obviously to me she does. And so she, uh, works on all the audio and we do all the, you know, social media and all of that stuff together. So, um, Annelise was down here in LA with me and we went to that wonderful festival. And Annelise, where are you coming to us today from?

Annelise Sexton:  I'm up in the North Bay in Alameda, California. A little Island off of Oakland.

Heather Newman:  Yup. Annelise, do you want to just give it a little bit more of an introduction to who you are and what you do for both Creative Maven and Mavens Do It Better?

Annelise Sexton:  Uh, yeah. So, um, I am a fine art major turned digital marketer. Um, I, for Maven and mavens do it better. I've been working with Heather for a number of years, started out just doing social media, moved on to the full gamut of digital marketing and graphic design and just kind of helping get her voice out there and her companies out there. Uh, yeah, just kinda, I think my title now is digital marketing strategist.

Heather Newman:  Yes. It is. Officially. Um, for sure. Yeah. And don't let her fool ya, Annelise pulls all of the levers and buttons behind the scenes and I couldn't do things without her. So you are like gold my friend.

Annelise Sexton:  Thank you very much.

Heather Newman:  Awesome. So, uh, so yeah, so we went to that WerkIT podcast festival. Um, I think you and I both came out of that super jazzed and just excited and you want to give everybody a little flavor of what you felt coming out of it?

Annelise Sexton:  Well, the first bit was it was a women's, uh, podcasting festival and you know, our current situation socially and politically, it's like, it was really kind of amazing, empowering to hear everyone's different story and how all these people are just going out there and telling their story and not getting stopped, you know, by, you know, whatever they call it, the glass ceiling and all of that. So it was really that community that kind of like we're, you know, strong, independent and you're going to hear our voices. And I just really appreciated that. I think another thing was like understanding the podcast industry more because you know, as you know, we both got into this, you know, kind of totally groms and just jumped in and if you started listening to us at the beginning to now it's, it's changed quite a bit. So just I think getting more tactical and more, I dunno, like industry specific feedback from people doing different things in the podcast world.

Heather Newman:  Absolutely. Yeah. The WerkIt festival was for women and non-binary and it was lovely. I mean there were I think 600, over 600 people attending and they've had over 5,000 attend the podcast festival has been going on for five years. And yeah, and I agree with you completely. It was just to be surrounded in the company of just amazing women telling their stories and um, you know, the, some of the stats that were just amazing were the, you know, there's 700,000 podcasts happening right now and, and more coming online every day. It kinda, I think it used to be right, that you would have a blog and yeah, I think now it's, you know, people are turning to podcasts and what's great about that is that, you know, it's, you know, it also minimizes screen time.

Annelise Sexton:  Totally. Well, I mean, and like the thing that I really love about listening to podcasts and like is that it is, it's almost like a silent disco because you put your headphones in and you hear the, whoever's talking, you hear their voice and it's like, it's very intimate to me. Whereas like listening on the radio, it's, you know, some, you know, they, it's, it's a different situation. Um, and that's what I appreciate about the podcast cause I really, I just like totally get more out of it information wise, than I would do read in an article or watching a video cause I don't get distracted.

Heather Newman:  Yeah, I agree. And you know, it's sort of, podcasts seems to me, just like you're saying, it's kind of, a lot of times, you know, you're usually alone, right. And, um, maybe while you're in your car or you're commuting or like lying in bed at night, you know what I mean? Like I listen to podcasts, you know, so it is fairly intimate and you do feel a different connection, I think to the people you're listening to, especially, you know, people just, you get to know them I think a little bit more as well. You know, you get to know that. Like they'll throw in, uh, a random fact or you know, a story of their life or whatever in the middle of it. And you really get a, get a sort of that intimate, deep look into somebody's life that you don't normally get, you know, from reading it off the page. So, yeah. And another interesting fact was that, um, there were, uh, it was, I believe it's 29 million episodes, um, in this last year and that 53% of all of the podcasts listened to in the last six months were being listened to by women. Um, just the facts and figures that were coming out from this just were astounding. One. And, and then there's just the amazing people that were part of the festival, um, from, you know, the opening panel with, you know, people in the industry who are producers and who have been doing this a really long time. You know, podcasts have been around. I don't, I'm trying to figure, I'm trying to remember what was the first podcast.

Annelise Sexton:  I, I, I think that, I mean it was really came, I mean popular culture kind of grabbed onto it with Serial, I think was first that kind of made it.

Heather Newman:  I agree

Annelise Sexton:  to a larger audience, but yeah, it's definitely, it's a new media for sure. And that was one of the big talking points from these, you know, especially the opening panel, like this is new and this is, you know, we make it what we want to want it to be.

Heather Newman:  Yeah, absolutely. It was, um, so the, the, one of the figures was that it's been about 15 years, believe it or not. Um, but really the last five have been the, you know, surge of podcasts in the market. And, yeah, it was really interesting to hear from, you know, there's, you know, uh, lots of podcasts like Serial of course, and what is it, death, sex and money. And there's some that have been around, you know, a long time, um, that just have millions of listeners, you know, millions of downloads. Um, and I think, you know, what was cool about the event, so many things, but, um, we had, there was a main stage and then there was a, um, another, uh, track that you could go to. And there was, um, a couple, it was just, you know, some of the titles where, you know, podcasting for disability justice, how to make your podcast more accessible. Um, internet is for pods, web strategy for audience growth, um, you know, top 10 mistakes freelancers make and how to avoid them. I loved that session. I thought that was fantastic and it was not just about podcasting, but it was about how to run your own business as well.

Annelise Sexton:  Right. And represent yourself. Yeah,

Heather Newman:  absolutely. You know, personal brand comes into play here a great deal. You know, it's, it's, you know, I, I've had people say I want to do a podcast, what do I do? You know? Um, and I, I was it, I think it was nine months that we played around, wasn't it?

Annelise Sexton:  I think for the ideation. Yeah, totally. It was kind of, you were like, I want to start a podcast and I'm like, I have no idea what we're doing. Let's do it. We just kind of, I think the first, the first 10 episodes or so, were like just figuring it out technically and then figuring out what we want the show to be.

Heather Newman:  Yeah, absolutely. You know, Annelise and I work really well digitally and, and also artistically and you know, working with another fine art major, me having a theater major and, you know, being visual and her. So we are, we use Pinterest boards, um, a lot. Uh, it's how we iterated on the logo for Mavens Do It Better. And also for the new Creative Maven logo that came out. So, you know, one of the things we do is, you know, we have an idea, we talk about it. And then my job is to go to Pinterest and start making a board. Um, and I love that you're adamant.

Annelise Sexton:  A look book.

Heather Newman:  Yeah. Uh, look book. Right. Um, and I think that's been really successful for us. Um, and then we usually, after we're done iterating on something, we usually share them. So our Pinterest boards are up under, under Hedda Newman and you can see those as well. That's kind of fun to how we kind of came up with that. And yeah, I, I saw so many friends doing podcasts and I was like, you know what, I want to do that too. And I did some radio KUKN cooking country and KLOG in Kelso, Washington through a shout out to that wonderful radio station that hired me during college and I did a lot of their PSA work. Um, and so I thought, you know, let's do this. And so I got started off with a zoom, uh, hm one. And so that was the sort of the smaller baby zoom and started out with that. And honestly it was, I was so nervous about just, you know, recording and the wonderful Tracy O'Connell, um, who runs, uh, is the event producer for the European SharePoint Conference, which is coming up in Prague here in December where I'm going to be speaking about diversity inclusion and women in tech. Um, we were at, I believe it was at Ignite I think. And I was like, I'm starting a podcast. You're my first, I'm not sure what I'm doing here, but we'll do it. And that literally is the first one that's up on the Mavens Do It Better site. I dunno. And that one was in an expo hall too. So you had like audio, Oh my God,

Annelise Sexton:  Yes, we've definitely created a recording rules list to make the audio engineer not cry.

Heather Newman:  Yeah. And you know, some things like, you know, uh, I do a lot of the podcast recordings, I work from home and so, you know, we had some new rules come up, uh, like please don't have the dryer on and buzz in the background. Um, air conditioning units can be exciting. And I also have a squeaky chair that needs some WD 40, you know, so if you're listening, it's, it's, you know, there's lots of people that have very professional studios and they spend lots of money on this stuff and that's great. You know, it's like whatever you could afford and all of that. But honestly, you know, you can start out with one handheld. There's some people that use, you know, their iPhones or smartphones and have apps that they record directly on as well. Um, but I've graduated to a zoom H4N pro. Um, uh, let's let, since we're talking about audio a little bit. Um, will you talk about what we're using, what you're using to deal with the audio on the back end? What, what technology we use?

Annelise Sexton:  Uh, yeah, so we started out, uh, per a recommendation from I think someone who had you knew, who does podcasts, to use the, uh, audacity program. And that's a free open source program that, uh, is really good for just like getting a start in editing. Like, I had never edited audio before in my life and someone, we downloaded the app and I'm like, Oh, okay. So it's like video except no pictures. Like I can figure this out. But then you know, now I'm doing some training on Adobe audition cause I think I have a little bit more control and finesse with that program. But definitely it's like a learning process cause you know, figuring out like, okay, is this, you know, stereo or mono or like how are we recording this and all this stuff. But it's like I think we're getting there and every episode I feel like we're getting, I'm, I'm improving myself. I feel like I'm understanding it more. Yeah. I mean I love learning new things and the internet is my favorite thing cause it gives you basically all the knowledge to become semi expert in anything.

Heather Newman:  Absolutely. Yeah. And I, and I, and I'm getting better at how I record when I record, you know, always sort of looking at improvements and I'll give a shout out. I'm, I'm, I'm almost certain that it was, and I think it was like three or four people, but it was Andrew Connell and, uh, Chris Johnson who do the MS cloud podcast, Jeremy Thake, who has been recording podcasts for a long time. It was Allister Pugin who was talking to me about, um, their podcast that comes out of South Africa, uh, two guys and SharePoint. And so, yeah, I think all of them at Christian Buckley, I think as well. So all of the, the, a lot of the guys in our industry who have, were really, you know, as far as SharePoint and Microsoft and me being an MVP and all of that, um, they started that way early, you know, like they've been doing it a long time and so they, I got to say, shout out to all you fellows who have been super-duper helpful and always answering questions. I was just on the phone with Jason Himmelstein and, uh, talking to him about, uh, their, uh, bifocal podcast and we were talking about equipment and, um, sharing some ideas, you know, that came out of the WerkIt festival as well. Um, and yeah, it's something that I also do folks is, you know, like I travel around a lot for my job. I get to speak in a lot of awesome places. And so I keep my zoom literally in my backpack with me. Um, and one of the, one of my favorite interviews was with Juan Carlos, who is a flamenco guitarist who's in his eighties, and he lives in Puerto Rico in San Juan. And I happen to be in his restaurant one night, happened to watch him play and happened to have just my mind blown by the stories he was telling while he was speaking. And, um, I asked him if I could podcast with him and he was like, sure, absolutely. Come back tomorrow. End up being, uh, taken downstairs into a basement, which I was like, ah, okay. And, um, and then he was like, actually this is the first bank that was outside, um, you know, the contiguous United States. It was the first bank, um, and it was the bank vault. And so it was a beautiful place to record since it was so cavernous. And, um, I just ended up letting him talk for an hour cause we usually try and keep these to like about a half hour or so. And you know, when he's talking about Salvador Dali and playing at the white house and being on ed Sullivan and just kept saying over and over again that life is a dream. I just, I was like, you can talk as long as you want.

Annelise Sexton:  I think you could have done a whole season with him in that bank vault. The audio was the most gorgeous.

Heather Newman:  Absolutely. And he's got such a delicious voice, so, um, ah, just yay. Thank you. So it was so great. And so, you know, I keep it on me. Um, and you know, I, I bought all these like microphones and all these cables and all this stuff and honestly when I'm in person, um, I find that the zoom, I can literally turn the record button on and I can set it between us. As long as I'm in a fairly quiet space and the audio is pretty good, you know. Um, for those of you starting out, you know, I've, I've bought some other things, you know, to lock into my computer to record audio and I'm still just getting started with that. Um, uh, we were talking Annelise and I were talking the other day, I'm like, okay, what adapter do we need to get this thing into my surface pro six. Um, so there's a lot of bells and whistles, but I think that you can also be minimal about it and have it, you know, actually be OK and, and um, be, be, uh, be a good audio feed. Um, Hey Annelise, I know there's a few things that came up across, you know, we've had other, we've had listeners reach out and say, Oh, I love the podcast, but, um, I'm trying to think of those things. Uh, one of them was about being able to download it from the website,

Annelise Sexton:  Yeah. And just, you know, figuring out like, okay, cause we host our, our podcast is hosted on the Squarespace site. And so not really being familiar with, you know, podcasting in general is like we did at first we didn't have the ability to download up episodes and then some, I think one of your friends recommended said like, I really want to do that because I'm overseas. I don't have a great internet connection. And it's like, and then of course it's like, look, look up SquareSpace help. It was like, Oh yeah, there's a button that you just click. Of course.

Heather Newman:  You either turn it on or off or just click the button as they say. Yeah. So that was when I'm also, uh, have had some folks talk about, um, accessibility and you know, the, there's people that um, you know, can't listen. And so, uh, there was, but there were folks that wanted to, to participate and so we made sure that we are doing transcripts of all of the episodes we tell everybody about dealing and doing, working on that and what tech we use?

Annelise Sexton:  Uh, so we use Temi. It's, uh, a web app that, um, does, it's like basically 10 cents a minute, AI audio transcription. And, it is. I would say, um, you know, the ones that I tried out, it was the most successful AI one in, uh, getting the correct words of course, and like the big thing from me is differentiate like in the transcript, differentiating between the different voices, different speakers and being able to identify those. And, um, that was, that's my favorite bit. And their editing, uh, interface is like, you can read along as, as it plays and do quick edits. And, uh, I think to me it's, it's my favorite one. And I think having transcripts to your podcast is so important and it's really not that much of an investment time or money wise if you use one of these services.

Heather Newman:  I think that's an awesome add. And I think so. And as far as, so we host on Squarespace, so we have a website, uh, www.mavensdoitbetter.com. And so they go up there. Uh, we also, you know, since Annelise is a digital marketing specialist, uh, we, we put everything up on social media too. Um, and so, you know, we have, uh, mavens do it better Facebook page. We have a mavens do it betta, B E T T A on Twitter and on Instagram because mavens do it better as too long for a handle. So we had to shorten it, um, with the betta instead of better. Um, and then, uh, also on Twitter the same. That's also just a tip as far as social media goes, if you can at all possible, have your handles be the same across everything you do. Um, so when you're choosing, yeah, you found that to Annelise, that sometimes you're like trying to find somebody, right?

Annelise Sexton:  Yeah. And like, you know what, you're going to get tagged more because people are like at, and they start typing it in and they'll remember your Twitter handle and, but they're on Facebook, so yeah. You know, if it's the same thing, it's gonna show up.

Heather Newman:  Yeah, absolutely. Um, we also, uh, post up on the Creative Maven YouTube channel. We put all of the, um, podcasts up there as well. Will you talk about that process a little bit about pushing that and what it looks like?

Annelise Sexton:  Yeah. So I think like, you know, and they did talk about this at the conference too and I appreciate it as like as like get it out there in as many places and formats as possible. So one of the things that we do is we do create full episodes, um, that have a full episode audio grams that go up on YouTube. So if someone is, you know, prefers YouTube, they can go and listen to it there. Um, we use this app that I absolutely love. It's very fun cause again, I'm a designer visual person, so being able to create something visual out of something that's completely audio I appreciate that. Um, it's called headliner and they let you make little audio grams, which are little animation videos of your selected audio. And you can do it for full episodes or you can do snippets for like social media, like Instagram. You can do like a one minute you put a graphic up and it'll have the audio waveform. It has transcripts that you can set up. Um, yeah, it makes it very easy to kind of, you know, draw people in, in a different way.

Heather Newman:  That's super cool. Is that free or is there a charge for that one?

Annelise Sexton:  So, we do the free plan cause I love free plans. Um, but since I was an early adopter for them, they're offering me some good stuff. We should talk about that at some point. But yeah, they do a free plan. It's like 10. You can create 10 videos a month I think,

Heather Newman:  Which is kind of perfect for us. The speaking of 10 a month, you know, for Mavens Do It Better. We, you know, are either doing four or five depending on the month. Um, we drop weekly on Thursdays and you know, I think in the beginning when I was like, I want to do this weekly, I don't know. What did you think?

Annelise Sexton:  Well, I was so new to it I was like, sure, why not? We'll see. Like, I can do anything!

Heather Newman:  Yeah. Well and that's your wonderful attitude and I have the same one. So I was like, yeah, let's do it weekly, you know? And, but yeah, I have to say that, you know, it is something that I look forward to that I, it is, it is one of a few things. There's a lot of things in, you know, we do a lot of scheduling, we create content marketing plans and, you know, uh, calendars and all that stuff. And that's something Annelise does not only for, um, Creative Maven and, you know, but we do it for our clients, you know, so she's very involved with all of our clients as well. And so we create a lot of that stuff for people, you know, to get them organized. And one of the things we always say is like, don't boil the ocean. You know, that consistency is more important than volume, you know. Um, and so, you know, I was like, did we just take our own advice or not? I'm not sure, but

Annelise Sexton:  well, I think we, you know, like you sometimes you just gotta like jump in and try out what you want to do and like, can you do what you want to do or figure out how to be able to do what you want to do. I don't think we're boiling, if it was like, you know, a two hour episode biweekly, you know, that would be, I would walk away.

Heather Newman:  Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. No, and it's, and it's been really fun. You know, people are like, how do you get your guests? And you know, honestly, again, we were just figuring this out. You know, I knew that I wanted to call it mavens do it better. I've always loved that t-shirt that Madonna wore that it said Italians do it better. And honestly, that's where it came from. Um, and uh, Maven means expert. I got that from the book The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell back in 2006 when I started Creative Maven and, uh, thought it was just such a sexy, cool word and I had already wanted to use the word creative in the title for my business and so put them together and you know, um, it's been, what, 13 years? And so when starting the podcast, I thought, you know what? Yeah, you know, experts do it better because they put in the time and the energy and passion and, and the failures and the, you know, the, the trying to get past things that sometimes are hard. You know, it's like when you are striving to be expert at your field, I think you do it better. So, um, that's kind of where that started. Um, yeah. And the, we, we, we've also made a decision, um, to drop, uh, 10 episodes last year today on Halloween. Um, and I think those were, again, I think we kept everything I did for the nine months and used those 10

Annelise Sexton:  Yeah, yeah, yeah. To get up when you first start publishing and get up on iTunes. I believe it is 10, you need to have 10 episodes up there to get listed on the, on their, um, Apple podcasts. So it was several months in the making me full, I got the first, uh, sort of publishing the first episodes.

Heather Newman:  Yeah, will you tell everybody I'm a little bit more about the Apple podcasts and then also all the other places we're on and why you chose that? I mean iTunes, I, you know, Apple podcast is sort of the, you know, it's the grand grandparent.

Annelise Sexton:  It's the standard,

Heather Newman:  Yeah, it's the standard.

Annelise Sexton:  And it's basically like a lot of the smaller podcatchers, um, they pull from iTunes, so you don't, once you get up on iTunes, you're going to be in hundreds of other places automatically because they're pulling directly from there. Um, the ones that don't is like Google play and Spotify who, and Pandora where they, um, you know, obviously compete with Apple.

Heather Newman:  Right. And we're up on Spotify. How long was that process? How long did that take? Do you remember?

Annelise Sexton:  Spotify was pretty quick. They were, I don't like the UI of their podcaster central or whatever they call it, but it was, I think it took, just like from the point of submission, I think we got a response within just a couple of days.

Heather Newman:  Okay, cool. And then with Apple podcast as well, it's either five or 10, I can't remember. I think you're right. But it's,

Annelise Sexton:  yeah, it's somewhere in there.

Heather Newman:  Yeah. And you also had to have a blog post, if I recall correctly. You had to have something written supporting it as well, I believe. Yeah. Um, and how about Stitcher?

Annelise Sexton:  Stitcher, yeah. And we put it up there. I think that one, that one's super-fast and they actually have a, make it really, really easy to get your, your, uh, feed up there and to get all of their promotional assets and all that stuff. So that's pretty fun too.

Heather Newman:  Yup. And what, what RSS feed do we use?

Annelise Sexton:  We, so initially started out with using Squarespace automated, but then for analytics, I switched it over to feed burner from Google. It was just easier for me to pull information from them than from Squarespace analytics, which for podcasts or RSS feeds is, you know, it wasn't, you know,

Heather Newman:  Up to snuff. Yeah, yeah. Got it. And folks, you know, anytime you want to hear the like real deal talk about stuff. Annelise. I love how, I'm going to say that, you always are, you tell the truth about all of that stuff and I love it. You know. No, it's, it's a great quality. Um, I also want to talk about analytics. So will you talk about how we've been tracking and changes we've made and things that we're thinking about there.

Annelise Sexton:  Yeah. So at first we didn't really do super tracking, like we could pull it in from into Google analytics from the feed burner and all that stuff. But it's, I didn't understand the numbers. I didn't understand the metrics. And you know, so earlier this year, I can't remember when I signed us up for the account that I cannot pronounce. It's B,L ,U , B, R, R. Y. I'm not even gonna try to say that cause it's not going to come out right. But it's like blueberry without a lot of letter, ees. And uh, they had, you know, of course it's a free bank cause I love free internet things. They basically, we could put an episode tracking, uh, link into our Squarespace posting and that would give us a numbers for that episode. And then when we're at the conference that people were, I think someone recommended to Chartable, which we then on the spot signed up for, which is even more inclusive because now they can specify where the traffic is coming from and they can see like Spotify numbers, iTunes or Apple podcast numbers and get really drilled down into what things mean. But it's still, I'm still trying to understand the numbers because with social media it's like, I know what each of these, you know, things mean, but with podcasts like, well what is a download? And if you go and you try to look up what do podcast metrics mean. Every page is going to give you a different answer because it's so new. So it's, it's something that was very hard to nail down and it makes me uncomfortable because it doesn't give you the hard numbers that like social media or email marketing give you. So it's getting there apparently.

Heather Newman:  Yeah. It's something everybody asks too, you know, when you say you have a podcast, people are like, how many listeners do you have and how many subscribers do you have and how many bla bla bla. And it is, a note to anybody out there who works on analytics or power BI or other things like that. Like it's a, it's an a little bit of an open market. I think right now if you can pull all that stuff together, cause you know, if it was something like a Google analytics tag that, you know, you taught, you drop into a website. If you could figure out how to like combine it with the sort of top podcasting hosting agencies so that we all as podcasters could actually know those figures. Um, there's a $1 million idea for ya. Um, with the 700,000 podcasts in the world.

Heather Newman:  Um, and I think, you know, that was something else, uh, that people talked about at WerkIt was, um, now that podcasts are being viewed by advertisers as a new medium, there's a lot of talk about, um, the consolidation of podcasts, of podcasts that are out there, um, that are popular, um, that are niche and all of that being pulled into other places to get produced. Um, and so, you know, Luminary recently came out, you know, Trevor Noah's on that and a few other people and there's a paywall, similar to medium where there's a paywall and some newspapers as well. Right? So that you can, you know, read so many articles or listened to so many for free or have the free account, but then to get to that premium or prime content, um, you have to pay. And it was interesting, uh, when, do you remember when, uh, when everybody said, who pays for podcasts? how many people raise their hands?

Annelise Sexton:  Like none. Like 10 out of 200. Yeah.

Heather Newman:  It was kind of interesting and you know, and, and then it was, would you, and you know, I think there were some more hands raised and stuff, but, um, it's interesting thinking about, you know, this potential consolidation, potential paywalls. I dunno. I feel like I've, as we've seen on, you know, many places that, you know, uh, I, I dunno, there are certain things I pay for, like I pay for the New York times and the LA times, you know, um, I don't are there things that you pay for? I'm trying to think.

Annelise Sexton:  Oh yeah, yeah. For like Netflix and Hulu and all of, that watch my programs. But, um, but I think for like podcasts, for me it's figuring out the monetization aspect is hard because if, if it all goes, I mean, that's why I love, what I love about Apple podcasts is it's basically like the YouTube for podcasts. It's like anyone can put their podcasts up as long as you know, it doesn't break their terms of use or guidelines. Um, and I love that kind of independent spirit of getting new, a lot of voices. I know like a lot of people are down on YouTube because you know, you got bots and you got people like influencing kids and you know, but I think it just, and there's a lot of fodder, there's a lot of crap out there, but there's also some really amazing things that, you know. I prefer the free, you know, free the YouTube model. It just, keeping those pathways open. Because like I think one of the ladies on one of the panels said that when you go talk to media people about podcasting, it's still a room full of men. Like, so I think, you know, if we're gonna like own this and, and change it, it's kind of a different model maybe. Of monetization.

Heather Newman:  Yeah, absolutely. I completely agree. Um, yeah, so, you know, folks. So as far as those who, one, first of all, thank you so much for listening. Um, and it's been so fun to talk to people and get feedback and hear comments and, you know, I've, I've, I've gotten some really great ones that were about, you know, my daughter is a Maven and she's awesome and thank you so much. You know, I think we forget sometimes, you know, no matter who you are or what level you are, you know, like families listen and, you know, it's, it's, uh, it's just, it's fun, you know. Um, I think that's been some of the, you know, the joy I've had with this and, and just, you know, connecting with people and, and sharing stories. You know, to me this is all about, I love the origin story part of it. I always ask about that. Um, love asking about what sparks people, you know, what got them to be where they are today, person place or thing or something. And they're always different. That's always the last question. Um, we got some really good feedback too. One of the cool things at WerkIT was that we, um, could sign up for a mentor and to, and to be a mentor. And so I signed up for both. And, um, and we got assigned, um, two mentees who we ended up having lunch with and, um, Nina and Pearl, so shout out to you. That was super fun. And then also, um, uh, we had an amazing conversation, uh, with a woman who is the, uh, LA Times a managing editor, one of them anyway. Um, and she used to be, uh, also the, um, uh, editor in chief. Sorry. That's what I was thinking of. I'm at slate magazine and her name is Julia Turner. And, uh, she was awesome. And you know, always have a mentor, you know, no matter what level you are, we all need that in our lives. I find that my, my father acts as that and many people in the community, my mom, you know, and um, Julia was great and she listened to the podcast, she checked out our stuff and she gave us some really great advice about, you know, she's like, Heather, you're, you know, you’re dynamic person, all of that. And, um, it's, you know, great that you're an interview. There's lots of podcasts though that are of somebody's, somebody dynamic and interesting, you know, uh, interviewing somebody else. There's a lot of those in the world. What makes your podcast different? What makes it special?

Annelise Sexton:  I thought that was great advice. I think that was like, huh, cause I, she, I think she was the one who said in the panel that media is habit and figuring out how to make your program a habit and like what, what's going to draw people in, what's gonna make them come back.

Heather Newman:  Yeah, absolutely. It was, it was one of those, she was saying, um, to tag onto that, she said that, you know, you, one of the things she said directly to us was that, you know, like what you want is to be consistent, you know, and that, and that goes for all marketing in a way, is that it's about consistency. And she's like, you know, if your listeners expect a certain thing and know what they get and she's like, you drop on, you know, on a, uh, once a week. So they know that. They go anywhere from, you know, 30 minutes to 45 minutes usually. They know that. Um, she said, think about, you know, what are the questions you ask every time and do that and be consistent about it. And she was like, who's your main audience? And I was like, well you know, tech, cause that's been my background for the last, you know, 20 years, you know, obviously my family and friends and, and I said, and we skew towards women I think too and in non-binary and the LGBTQ, cause I have many friends and many connections and work in diversity and inclusion in that way too. We have lots of wonderful men that listen as well. So Julia was saying, you know, to be, um, to, to give them the same, the same things over and over again. You know, like, you know, you talk about technology, you talk about brand, you talk about, you know, this, the, the spark question is awesome. You talk about origin stories, you know, just make sure you hit those every time and then your audience knows what to expect. You know, and other podcasts that I really like, um, that I've been listening to recently is Donald Miller's, uh, Building a StoryBrand and he, he has a similar, um, you know, how he lays things out. And that's one of the things that Annelise and I've talked about after the, uh, the festival was, you know, how we lay things out. Do we make cuts? Um, how do we, uh, just, you know, build that consistency in and ask the questions. And then you had some really good thoughts about that from, you know, and you can, you can tell them some of the things you asked me to do. Because I need to be better as a host.

Annelise Sexton:  Big thing is when, you know, the audio has been interrupted, is giving that pause a couple seconds so that the editor can make it sound pretty and like, it's still part of the thing, even though you had to cut some things out. Um, I think it's just, and also like, you know, you're like you said, like you're, you have a theater background, so you're like a one-take, like one and done, you know, like that you get one chance. And like now it's like, okay, well now we can, as we've progressed, you know, throughout the series is figuring out like, okay, so if we have these kind of our structure, it's like, can we mix things around, can we ensure that we're highlighting the best of our guests by, you know, focusing and like, you know, you know, sometimes and sometimes that means cutting things out and moving things around and all that stuff. So.

Heather Newman:  absolutely. I know I've had a couple of people asked me, they were like, you don't have, you don't make cuts. And I was like, no. And it is the theater training of like, you get one shot, you know.

Annelise Sexton:  Yeah.

Heather Newman:  So that was kind of a big eye opener of like, Oh yeah, right. We did, we made a couple of edits in a podcast a couple weeks ago. And it was just because there was a big sort of gap and there was like a little bit of like, Oh, and you know, I was like, Oh, we should cut that out, you know? And, and I was like, I know that seems like it's silly that we wouldn't, you wouldn't, you know, think that, but, um, it kind of opened up a whole new world.

Annelise Sexton:  Yeah, I was like, you can record an hour-long podcast and we'll take the best 30 minutes.

Heather Newman:  And lots people do that. I know Mike Blazer and Mary Jane Gibson our friends who do the Weed and Grub podcast, you know, I've done, I've been on their podcast and you know, like listening to, you know, knowing what was recorded and then knowing what gets cut and you know, into the actual, um, episode. I was like, yeah, okay, interesting. You know, this is, but you know, the, the other great thing is, is that, you know, we've been doing this awhile and, and you know, some of them have been one shot, you know, for the most part. So you don't have to be super technical making tons of cuts and all that kind of stuff. I mean, the sound is the biggest thing, obviously. Um, but you can be as minimal or as, um, I was going to say maximal, but I don't think that's a word.

Annelise Sexton:  Yeah. I mean, there's so many tools out there that it is, it you, you know, like I could do a blog series on how to do it for basically free.

Heather Newman:  Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, completely. I mean, and pulling together just all the different things and, and that's kind of why we wanted to do this is that, you know, we just, we wanted to share things that, you know, we've tripped over and things that we figured out, um, and things that we're, you know, still figuring out and we'll continue to figure out as this medium evolves, um, and just becomes larger and more and more people are doing it. Um, but it's been, it's been really fun and I, you know, and I feel like you and I both have learned a ton about the whole thing. Um, yeah. And it's been great. And also, you know, a big thank you to all of our guests. Um, you know, there's some people that have your know it was their first podcast, which is really exciting and you know, and, and you know, I think no matter who you are, you know, some people are a little bit more introverted than the other, uh, than others. And, you know, it's been really fun, you know, also just making people feel comfortable. And I think that that shows in the pod or that shows, I guess in the podcasts, you know, just the comfortability of being able to talk about life and talk about, you know, stories and where people are from. And I really, I'm very moved by people sharing those things. Um, cause sometimes it's very personal and I really appreciate that, that you would share that with me and share that with our listeners. It's, it's really, really fun. Really dig it. So that's good. Um, any other takeaways from the WerkIt festival? I'm trying to think of other, Oh, we just, we, we got bombarded and barraged.

Annelise Sexton:  Oh, so much information and so much free coffee. It was terrible.

Heather Newman:  Yes. I highly recommend the WerkIt a festival. Um, I know that they'll do it again in 2020 and um, it was just awesome. And the, uh, the ACE hotel was great and they, you know, did a lot of great. Uh, Oh actually, uh, we did see a live podcast interview.

Annelise Sexton:  Oh yes, yes. Yeah. Hear to Slay. Oh my God. That was, I'm a huge fan of Roxane Gay. And to be able to see her in person like, uh, that was awesome. That's what, you know, I'm a big reader. I love listening podcasts and it's basically is I love hearing other people's stories because you know your story, you can get so caught up with it that you don't see anything outside of it. I think like that show just shares so many diverse stories, but then also creates a place for conversation about it.

Heather Newman:  Yeah. I, I couldn't agree more. And it's Roxane Gay and Dr. Tressie McMillan, um, they do the podcast together and it was just, it was cool, you know, it was, um, and, and the production of the whole darn thing was cool. You know, there was a huge stage, big screen, you know, everybody was sitting in comfy fireside chat chairs and um, and it was just great and they had a bunch of guests on and you know, hearing their story and Hear to Slay is a black feminist podcast. Um, you know, and they do that. They, they say that the, you know, it's an intersectional perspective on celebrity culture, politics, life, love, all of that. And so, you know, it's a great one to follow. Um, and it's going to be on a, I believe it's on the Luminary app as well.

Annelise Sexton:  Yes. And it's really funny, like brilliant women having great conversations and you hooked on to somebody that they said there. And I, you know, that was like, probably the best thing that I have ever heard is like, we sometimes have men on our show as guests on our show, but they have to be truly exceptional men. And I was like, I was like about to cry. I was like, this is brilliant.

Heather Newman:  Yes. Here's too exceptional men and women and everyone for sure. Yeah,

Annelise Sexton:  Exceptional people.

Heather Newman:  Exceptional humans, exceptional, exceptional humans for sure. Yeah. So it was just really fun. So, you know, check out the WerkIt podcast festival. Um, there's another one, uh, that's called the third coast festival that's in, uh, Chicago, I know a really big one too. Um, and just look out for, you know, local stuff. There's lots of meetups and that kind of things of people learning how to podcast and podcasting together and all of that. So definitely check that out. Um, we'd love for you to follow us and hopefully if you're listening, you probably already are of all of our different, you know, social media channels and if you have someone that you're like, Oh my gosh, you should be on, you know, Mavens Do It Better, please let us know. We've got a contact form on the website or just DM us and, and let us know. Um, we've had a handful of people come to us that way too. Um, you know, I don't know everybody that's been on the podcast personally. There's a lot of people that are friends and colleagues and family that have been on. But, um, there's been, you know, like almost a handful of folks that, you know, heard the podcast and reached out and said, Hey, you know, I'm launching a book or I'm doing this or I'm doing that. Um, and uh, talk to them a little bit and we've had them on. So, um, and that's the, Oh, that's another thing. Um, in talking about podcasts is one of the things that they were talking about is cross pod interviews and that, that's a really great way to get more followers is, you know, you interview somebody, um, who also has a podcast and they interview you so you do a cross pod. That was a big takeaway too about making sure you do that.

Annelise Sexton:  Yeah, definitely. Especially finding, you know, uh, podcasts that have a similar target audience a similar audience size. It's like, that's, it's like a really easy thing to, you know, get your voice out there and get, you know, your, your product out there and while supporting someone else's at the same time.

Heather Newman:  Yeah. Super complementary too. Um, the last sort of bit, um, before we sign out, cause we're gonna have a little bit longer one than usual, but this is our anniversary first year special. So I think it's all right.

Annelise Sexton:  Well we'll see where we get with the cuts.

Heather Newman:  Oh, I see. She's got the scissors out.

Annelise Sexton:  I am dreading having to edit this one. I'm like, Oh my God, my voice.

Heather Newman:  Oh, your voice is wonderful.

Annelise Sexton:  I know, but it's like, you know, not being used to hearing my voice recorded. You know, I'm just feel like, ah, I gotta find every error I made and try to edit it out. So this will come out in 2021.

Heather Newman:  Oh my God. I love it. I love it. Um, let's see. Another takeaway. Um, two things, two things. One, uh, quick talk about music. So, um, uh, the music at the beginning of the show is by wonderful fella, Jesse Case and he, uh, is one of, uh, the main music directors at, uh, the second city in Chicago. I got to him through Mary Jane and Mike of Weed and Grub. Um, he did their podcast music and I really liked it. And I was like, all right. Um, and you know, and, and I think, you know, we continue, we'll be, you know, obviously using that beautiful music that Jesse Case created. And then I've had some other friends say, Hey, you know, I'm a musician, can I, you know, do some music for you. And so I think we might have some fun with that next year as well. Um,

Annelise Sexton:  Totally. Get some like transition and bumper music.

Heather Newman:  yeah, exactly. So I've had a few folks reach out and be like, Hey. And I was like, yes, please. So that's kind of awesome. But yeah, Jessie was great. And, um, how we did that is that, um, it was fun. I was like, you know, I was like, I love, my favorite song in the entire world is Baby, I'm a Star by Prince. The rest in peace Prince, I'm not going to go there. But anyway, you know, but that is my favorite song in the whole world. And I was like, and I was like, I like funk, I like something with a bottom with bass and all of that. And I want it to be upbeat. And so, you know, and I think I give him a few more songs and, um, we went back and forth and, you know, talked about what the podcast was about and he created, you know, some different, um, you know, lines for me to listen to some melodies and stuff, and then we, you know, iterated a little bit more. And I think I actually said to him, it needs more bottoms.

Annelise Sexton:  Like turn up the funk.

Heather Newman:  Yeah. Turn up the funk for sure. And, uh, and so that's how we came to that. And so that's been our intro and outro music, um, for all year, which has been amazing. And then my beautiful friend who's also a musician, um, and who's worked with me on Microsoft events and is a brilliant, you know, web designer, partner manager, all of that stuff, Julia Francis and, um, she is the voice of the intro who intros the podcast. And she did that for us. And you know, she's, uh, you know, I met her years ago in Seattle as a theater person and we did shows together. And, um, and did a lot of acting and fun stuff together. And so she's great. And, uh, if you're in the Seattle area, she plays all the time, um, out at many, many venues. Uh, Julia Francis is terrific, so you should check her out too. Um, yeah, so we've had a lot of really fun, you know, collaborations with people too, you know, trying to bumbling around a little bit and being like, who should do that? And maybe who would do that, you know, things, some, some things, you know, you know, we pay people for their good work and all of that. And then as Annelise tries to get everything free as she can to keep the costs down.

Annelise Sexton:  I love free stuff.

Heather Newman:  Well, totally right. That sort of leads the conversation into, you know, money and sponsorships. And so like at this point, you know, we don't make any money on the podcast, you know, it's, it's not something that we get paid to do. It's something that, um, is about brand building and sharing beautiful information out in the world and, and something that we're passionate about. And, um, the big topic around, you know, at WerkIt was definitely how to monetize and sponsorship and that sort of thing. We've been talking about it a bit, but we haven't really gone down that path so much yet, you know?

Annelise Sexton:  Right. And I think it's, you advertising within podcasts is still in its infancy. Like there's, um, I can't remember what they called it, but it was when the ads were inserted automatically into someone's podcasts. Um, which like I had never noticed before, but then like I started listening to a new podcast and I was like, Oh my God, that one is total. Like the volume's louder. Like it has nothing to do with the topic of the podcast. Like it was like listening to the radio and I'm like, I'm gonna stop listening to this podcast because of that.

Heather Newman:  Yeah. Well, it's like all of a sudden, it's like those car commercials, right? Where they're like talking along and they're like, AND YOU CAN GET IT FOR FREE and then it's the fine print where they're like duh-duh-duh and you're just like, okay, I want to vomit. It just is making me crazy. Yeah, no, yeah, absolutely.

Annelise Sexton:  It's like we've been, you know, definitely like spoiled by, you know, streaming services like Netflix where there's no commercials or YouTube skip this ad in 10 seconds. You know? Like, and so for me, when I hear an ad in a podcast, as I said earlier, it's like, it's a very, you know, it's like, it's like reading a book for me, it's a very, I'm very in it and so when it gets broken by, you know, sloppy or kind of out of place advertising, I'm like, done, hanging up the phone. Like not going to do it because it just breaks that experience for me.

Heather Newman:  I agree with you. I think the ones that I feel are most successful as well, I know Weed and Grub does this, you know Donald Miller does it. I've some other ones, like it's that the person who is the host actually does the ad.

Annelise Sexton:  Yeah. The host-reads. Yes.

Heather Newman:  And I really, I appreciate those

Annelise Sexton:  One, you know, like this is not like, you know, buy, go buy this car, salesman cringy stuff going on. It's just like, Hey, you know, these people help me do this thing that I love to do. You know?

Heather Newman:  Yeah. And that's, that's kind of what it's about, right, is that someone's helping you do what you do well by, you know, supporting you. And we've had, you know, one of our guests, you know, Alan Campbell who has a beautiful winery, Camlow Cellars, he's a photographer. You know, we've talked about some of this sort of sponsorship stuff and, and which we, we haven't, you know, gotten, gotten, you know, down to the skinny on it yet. And I've had a couple of other people approach me on it and you know, I think for us it's, you know, I'm not opposed to doing advertising. I think, you know, I was talking to Jason about this a little bit and some other folks, you know, it's like there's like the pre-placement of something in front, there's the in, in pod, you know, moment. And then there's the, you know, outro as well. So there's like three places, right, where you could actually drop an ad in. And um, there there's some pretty cool metrics and stuff and maybe we'll put that link in the show notes of a couple of articles about, you know, what things should cost and how to, you know, set up something like that. So that if somebody asks you, you know, Hey, can I sponsor your podcast? You could be like, sure. And what do you need, you know, or what do you want? Or what would it be? And not to over commit, you know, there is no 60 second spot, you know what I mean? Like there's no, there's no,

Annelise Sexton:  Right, right. Oh god no.

Heather Newman:  yeah, yeah. Like please, no, you know, so it's like, it's going to be short, sweet to the point. And, and in the, in the back end of the podcasts too, it's like, you know, being able to, you know, thank people and you know, like call out, you know, who does your music and who, you know, that kind of stuff is important I think as well. And, um, one last thing and then, and then I'll, I'll, I'll bring us to our, our close. Um, was, uh, the, there was a conversation happening, um, on, uh, Twitter about, uh, what, uh, um, Joanna Klein was asking, who's another MVP in my community, and she was talking about, do you fast forward, um, the beginnings of podcasts and/or do you listen to them at a different speed? Which I thought was an interesting question. Um, and I, I, I listen to podcasts at regular speed or just one up, depending. Mostly regular. Cause I love people's voices. But I think with audible when I'm listening to a book, I do tend to do 1.25X um, depending though, you know, so it's interesting thinking about if, if people get to know your show, will they skip over part of it to get to the meat or not? You know, I don't know. How about you? What do you do?

Annelise Sexton:  Oh, I listen to it. I think, I mean I'm like one of those people who like, you know, if I go to a movie or pickup, a new book and no matter how horrible it is, I will finish it. Like I will, I have to hear the whole thing and like, you know, so it's, yeah. So I'll, I'll go through, it's the ones that I will not listen to another episode if it is excessive. Like if it is like getting into it, it's like, okay. Got it. I appreciate the ones. So some of the longer form ones where they're telling one story throughout, you know, multiple episodes. It's like, I love it that a lot of them don't do the recap. It's like, this is a podcast, like I'm bingeing on this. I don't need a recap.

Heather Newman:  I think. Yeah. And I think it may play into, if it's a something like Serial or one of those other ones, you know, you're, you're going into and, but, but for, yeah, I think for the most part we're, we're, we're bingeing and I'm on Amazon prime for example, or Netflix, like I do tend to skip the intro, you know? Yeah. Cause I've seen it before, you know, um, and I want to get to the meat of it. But yeah, with podcasts I feel like, I like the whole thing is about the voices and listening to folks. And then also, you know, who knows, they might change it up and then you've missed something. Right? Like, I don't know, maybe they're doing a promotion.

Annelise Sexton:  Well, and it's not as controlled as it is with, you know, like Netflix or whatever. It's like, it doesn't, you know, your episodes aren't tagged where the open intro begins and ends, you know, so like you're skipping like, Oh wait, no, I've gone into the actual episode. Like,

Heather Newman:  Yeah. Where do you listen? I listen on, on the Apple podcasts on my phone for the most part.

Annelise Sexton:  Yes, I do too.

Heather Newman:  Yeah. I mean, I, and I do Spotify sometimes. It depends. Just because

Annelise Sexton:  See, I don't pay for Spotify so don't do it.

Heather Newman:  Yeah. I like Spotify. So yeah, sometimes I'll listen to it there. It depends. Um, yeah, it's super fun. So lots of great technology and all of that and you know, and you know, the, the branding of things and what technology you use and you know, all of those things play into this and, and hopefully, you know, we shared some things that, um, maybe you know, you haven't gotten your fingers on yet and uh, can, can help you with your podcasting and all of that if you're starting one. And, um, if you have any great suggestions on things that you use and want to share those, um, on any of the, you know, comments in social media, please let us know and we'll, you know, continue to put that kind of stuff out and up, um, on pages as well. Um, but yeah, and I, you know, Annelise, happy anniversary.

Annelise Sexton:  Yeah! Happy anniversary to you lady.

Heather Newman:  And thank you so much for producing this podcast. Um, I couldn't do it without you, so I just thank you so much. I, I'm not going gonna cry.

Annelise Sexton:  I mean, I get to call myself a podcast producer now. That's, hella fancy. I like it.

Heather Newman:  I love your, I love your Californian terms, grom, hella. It's so good. It makes me so happy. I'm Midwestern Californian now, but I, you know, but it's great that I love it. Uh, so everybody, um, we, we just hit one hour, so we've got to cut this, we gotta cut this.

New Speaker:   So much cutting.

New Speaker:   Yes. So much cutting. So anyway, um, again, truly thank you to all the colleagues and friends and family and, and, and people we don't know and people I don't know, listeners, um, guests. Everybody who's answered questions along the way to help us do this and, um, given us some great tips and, and been guests on our show and to Jessie case for the beautiful music and Julia Francis for her lovely voiceover. And you know, uh, Mary Jane and Mike introducing us to Jesse. And you know, so many people have, um, been so helpful with this and it's been a real pleasure, uh, to bring this content to you and to the world. So we're going to keep going. And one thing we are going to do that I'll tell you right now if you've stayed with us this long, is that we are going to take a little bit of a hiatus coming into the holidays. And so we're going to take that time to do a bunch of interviews and work on some of the things that we learned from WerkIt. Um, and so this will be the last podcast of the year on our anniversary. We're gonna take a hiatus while we go into the holidays. So if you're listening and haven't heard the 50, how many? Six. Seven, something like that?

Annelise Sexton:  this is 59. I think

Heather Newman:  59. Okay. Uh, the 59 episodes that we have up, do check them out because you'll hear the progression as well of how we're learning and changing things along the way. Annelise, you're amazing. Thank you so much for being on today. I so I can't believe I got her to do this. I'm so happy.

Annelise Sexton:  I mean, it's only because there's no camera.

Heather Newman:  Well, fair enough. Well, you know everyone that has been another, and our one year anniversary episode of Mavens Do It Better here is to another beautiful day on this big blue spinning sphere. Thank you.

Episode 57: Speech Maven Nicole Butler

Heather Newman:  Hello again, everyone. Here we are with another episode of the Mavens Do It Better podcast where we interview extraordinary experts who bring a light to our world where we talk a little bit of tech, we talk brand, origin stories of what makes our mavens tick. So today I'm very excited to have on Nicole Butler. Hi Nicole.

Nicole Butler:  Hi.

Heather Newman:  How are you?

Nicole Butler:  I'm amazing. Thanks for having me on.

Heather Newman:  Wonderful. Well, Nicole is the founder and executive director for Speech Within Reach here in Los Angeles, California. And she is amazing and she's, she's not she, she does that but you're board certified. You're an actor, you're a mountain climber. There's so many things I could list after this. You're pretty amazing.

Nicole Butler:  Thanks girl! You are too.

Heather Newman:  Awesome. Yeah, Nicole and I caught up at a Dodgers game a while back. It Was my first, but I think it was the first time that we, any of us had stepped on the field actually. So that was kind of cool.

Nicole Butler:  Yeah. That was the first time I've been on any baseball field, well, major league that is.

Heather Newman:  Yeah. Right, right. So that was super fun and it was so fun to meet you and get to know you a little bit more after that. And everyone, so Nicole has this great, wonderful organization that she founded. And I'd love for everybody to know a little bit more about Speech Within Reach and where that came about. So would you tell everybody about your beautiful business?

Nicole Butler:  Yes. Absolutely. Thanks for asking. Yeah, so Speech Within Reach is a, we do home-based speech therapy services for children, so we drive to them, which is a big thing, especially in Los Angeles. The last thing people want to do is get in their car and drive somewhere. And because we go in the family's home we're able to set up a, specialize the program to cater to whatever the children's specific needs are. So if you're going to a clinic and your child is needing speech therapy services, it's just one time a week or three times a week. They're only exposed to whatever items or objects are in that room. So they're playing with, you know, a puzzle with farm animals or whatever. But when we go in the home, we get to learn, Oh the dog's name is Oreo and the brother and sister's names. And we get to know what objects and toys that they love when they're at home. So we can focus the words and vocabulary building around things that they're around more often. And we can it helps with carry over as well because at the end of our sessions, we like to communicate with the guardian and relay anything so that they can use what's in the home to carry over the therapy.

Heather Newman:  Wow. That's super cool. And so when, what ages are you dealing with?

Nicole Butler:  Well, I mean we're birth to 18, but the majority of the children that we work with are, I would say between two and eight.

Heather Newman:  Gotcha. Wow, that's amazing. And so and you board certified and you know, speech language pathologist,

Nicole Butler:  I know, it's funny. It sounds like, yeah, it sounds so intense. Like pathologists it's, it's a speech therapist and a speech language pathologist, are exactly the same thing. Um it's just terms that they decided to use. And, but there is if you're board certified, that means you have your national certification and you did a fellowship and you were supervised as well as having your master's degree and yeah. And you're usually state licensed as well.

Heather Newman:  Yeah. And you've been, I mean, you went to Purdue, which, you know, I, I'm from the Midwest as well and a lot of my family went there, so I'll go Boilermakers. 

Nicole Butler:  Oh wow! Boiler-Up!

Heather Newman:  Yup. Boiler up. Yes. And then NYU. So you've been pursuing this a long time. What's the origin story? How did this spark happen with you?

Nicole Butler:  Sure. So my mother is a therapist. And growing up I always was fascinated, you know, why people do things that they do. So I was always pretty intuitive and an empath as well. And so I think that started, you know, started it. But then I also love babysitting kids. I was like the neighborhood's favorite babysitter. And then I remember meeting I became best friends with a girl who was deaf. She was hearing impaired, but so she had hearing aids, but they didn't, it still was difficult for her. She struggled. So she was fluent in sign language. And I remember her and I we were at a gas station getting candy and she was trying to communicate to the, the man behind the counter. And he was, he kind of was ignoring her and just asking me questions and not making an attempt to communicate with her. And I saw her get so frustrated. And that was sort of a moment for me that I realized how important communication is. And I learned sign language because of her. And this was, gosh, in like seventh grade or so. And so that kinda started all of it. And then I just became fascinated with the whole field once I learned more about it.

Heather Newman:  Yeah. Well, and communication on all levels, you know, with your this beautiful business helping children and then also theater and improv and, and all of that. So, you know, grand communicator on so many levels as an artist? Will you talk about that side too? I know, I know you've been really active in that for a long time. And so where did that start?

Nicole Butler:  Well, yeah, so I've always wanted to, I always like kind of being the goofy, like one with my friends and entertaining and I took acting classes when I was younger and when I really, when I when I really decided I was really passionate about it. It was when I was taking improv and sketch comedy classes and I just remember looking forward to the class and having such a blast and just, you know, getting to be creative too, because with improv you have to think, you know, on your feet. And I took classes when I was younger and then that just continued while I was in grad school in New York. And same thing when I was in Chicago, I did Second City and Improv Olympic. And then when I moved to LA, I did Groundlings and Upright Citizens Brigade. But I started booking work, you know, doing goofy, at first it was like commercials and, and then I booked Kelsey Grammer's show Boss, you know, doing some drama stuff and it just kind of snowballed from then. And then I played Melania Trump on Jimmy Kimmel and also played like a double agent on NCIS. So the drama, there's, you know, there's so many more drama shows and there are comedy. There's just so much more opportunities. But comedy is definitely like my passion.

Heather Newman:  That's so cool. Yeah. I loved the second city growing up outside of Chicago, so yeah. Michigan, Indiana and Illinois for me were growing up. So I've sort of know a lot of those places that you've said. That's so cool. How do you find sort of Los Angeles, you know, for all of that, you know, people, you know, you, you, you've lived in and sort of worked in all the big cities and the third coast, you know, Chicago. How do they compare as far as getting work? And it sounds like you've kinda been doing it over time too, but did you find that there was any city that had sort of more appeal for you?

Nicole Butler:  Yeah, I'd say New York and Chicago are more theater type communities and there's, there's not really a shortage here in Los Angeles for actors. That's for sure. We're sort of inundated. But I, you know, there's just a lot more work here. There's actually a lot of work here and as well in Atlanta, like in the Southeast and they actually have more shows, TV, and movies than New York now. But the New York still has great work. Yeah, the communities are just so different. I, you know, the thing that I miss about, about New York is you could walk everywhere and there's a little bit more of sense of community. Here because you're driving people a more isolated. But yeah, I feel like the market here is more, theater is not the push. It's definitely TV and film.

Heather Newman:  Yeah, absolutely. And so much, I think like voiceover work, voice acting work, that seems to be so much of that, but you can kind of be anywhere for that, you know? But it's making those connections. I think maybe that are here.

Nicole Butler:  I think, yeah, exactly. Voiceover work you can do in your closet. You know, I've seen people do it. Their setup is in the closet. They're like, it's padded, you know, perfect for sound. And then even with auditions for TV and film, you don't have to live in Los Angeles necessarily. I know for when I auditioned for shows on the East coast I tape them, I just record them on my iPhone and send them to them so I don't have to show, you know, you know, everything is becoming digital. So,

Heather Newman:  Wow, I think at some point we're going to be, you know, sending in audition tapes via Tic-Toc, you know.

Nicole Butler:  Oh yes. Oh my gosh. I love Tic-Toc. It's so entertaining. It's like the big thing right now. I don't have an account yet. Do you?

Heather Newman:  You know, I downloaded it I think a while ago. But I was watching, I saw a tweet from Gary V, and I was like, Oh, you know, and I was like, Hmm. And so I actually played on it last night, got an account and yeah, it, it, it definitely will suck your time. But you know, there's an audience on there and I just couldn't believe like the millions of people that are viewing this stuff, you know.

Nicole Butler:  I know that's what's and well and Gary, it's funny you say Gary V cause that's how I learned about it because he was saying that it's the next, you know, Instagram.

Heather Newman:  Yeah, absolutely. Well, and I think it's that sort of age range. I saw something the other day and I was thinking about you I posted it on Facebook and it was about generation alpha and I hadn't heard that term before. And it was talking about kids that are sort of in that eight to 10 year old that sort of space and generation and talking about how they're going to be the most, you know, computer literate, the most digital literate, probably the most wealthy actually. And that there are influencers now that are 10 years old. There's one kid who's got, you know, 2 million followers on YouTube and, and a toy company has picked him up and he's gonna create toys from, he was doing reviews of toys just as a kid.

Nicole Butler:  Oh my gosh. Yeah. Well, it's amazing how many, just those basic, I know my friend with her little one who's like six months or he still watches it, from the time, you know, six months till now he's two. But it was just like, it's like someone showing a toy and it's just like an object and they're like, truck, here's the truck. And then they're like, car, here's a car. It's so basic, but it's has so many views. I do wonder what's that generation just as a speech therapist because I, because I work a lot with social skills. I work with autism and children that are trying to have appropriate social skills or learn how to make friends. And I wonder how it will be when they actually interact with a person. If you're, you know, I'm just curious how that will evolve because you're, you have a different, you know, skill set with interacting through a computer or through a phone.

Heather Newman:  Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think now these days, you know, we talk about, you know, ghosting and, you know, there's just all of the sort of the, the dopamine rushes and the serotonin, like all of that stuff that we get from people liking things and, and all of that. And I, it's, it's, people don't know how to talk to each other anymore. Like to pick up a phone and to call somebody. I have called somebody in the last few, few, and I, every time they'd been like, did you butt dial me? And I was like, no.

Nicole Butler:  No, I called you. Oh, that's funny. One of my single friends was out with his guy friends and he was saying, and these guys are like in their twenties, like 25 to 30. And he was saying that he's like, and he's 10 years older than them, you know. And he was like, we're out. And I'm like, are we gonna meet girls? You know, are we going to go talk to girls? And they're like, no, no. That's what Tinder and you know, Bumble, like we don't, we can just meet someone, like if we want right now, they will show up. But it's, they don't have the interest even. I dunno if that's generalized everywhere, but I just thought that was interesting.

Heather Newman:  No, I think that there is something to that for sure. I think going out people like want to hang with their friends and they're not going out like I think maybe I used to, you know when I was in my twenties to meet people. Yeah, I know. It's kinda weird. Cause you can just do it on an app. Right. yeah. Do you, do you use technology in what you do with the kids or is it more toys?

Nicole Butler:  So, it depends. That's a good question. Yeah, it depends. So we do, it depends on the need. So if a child, like for example, like I work, I work sometimes with a school here and see some of the kids and they have a lot of deaf and hearing impaired children. And so, they, you know, with cochlear implants a lot of the children are cochlear implants, or they have hearing aids. And so cochlear implants is a pretty invasive procedure, but pretty incredible in that it goes, they are actually drilling through the skull. It sounds very kind intense, but they are putting a wire that goes through the Celia like this, like the little snails shell inside of your ear. And this wire stimulates your hair Celia. And so it's it stimulates it and then they put this like little magnet you like on top of the skull. It's like a little magnet. It's like a little, looks like a little button and it activates, it, stimulates it, and then they have hearing. And my understanding is that the hearing is similar to, they say the people that have once had hearing and then lost it and then had a cochlear implant or are saying that it sounds kind of tinny like a little bit different. But you know, it's pretty amazing that they can be profoundly deaf and be able to hear. And of course not everyone qualifies for it. It depends, just like with, you know, LASIK surgery. So we use technology that way. And then actually I have kind of a funny story. I have a girl that she, she's dealing, she's now 13. She has cochlear implants. And I've seen her for six years or so. And I'm, I'm just consulting and doing checkups on her every couple of years. And when she's mad at her parents, you know, cause now she's a teenager, she just closes her eyes and takes off her cochlear implants so she can't hear them. She has total control. She can't see or hear them.

Heather Newman:  Uh yeah, I think my father at 75 does that with my mom. So, you know, and like lots of people, yeah. Lots of people's parents. I see do that sometimes. You'll see him pull up, pull the hearing aid out. But yeah, that's wild.

Nicole Butler:  Another, another technology that is, is used is children, like for example, they have cerebral palsy and they're not able to verbalize or talk at all. For the children that are nonverbal they'll have machines, you know, or now it's basically just a computer that they talk through, you know, if it's an iPad. Um or you know, like Stephen Hawking, you know, he had a, he has a communication device and the technology in that is pretty amazing now.

Heather Newman:  Wow. Yeah. No, I, I, and I saw, you probably have experienced this many times, but I there was internet meme going around of baby, like young, young kids and here it was one of, you know, someone hearing their sister or their mother's voice for the first time.

Nicole Butler:  First time. Isn't that beautiful? It's beautiful. Oh yeah. I've seen it happen. It is pretty amazing. You know, there used to be an old thought to that was I think it's called sound and fury, I think. And this is kind of the eighties nineties thought for people that were deaf and hearing impaired is that they did not want to hear because they were very proud that their child also was deaf. There's a strong genetic link that if you're profoundly deaf that your child will be depending of course on the cause of that impairment. But so they were very proud so that they were, that they were deaf, they wouldn't have their children implanted. And it was kind of a big divide when cochlear implants started becoming more common. And yeah, so a lot of kids didn't get implanted because of that and it's just sort of interesting, they see it as, well, we're hearing impaired, but our other senses are heightened. So their visual skills are off the charts. They can see. And I, I used to work at a deaf school in Chicago, and I remember I would come into, when I'd come into the classroom, there was a couple of kids and, if they weren't even facing me, they knew I was there. They would wave and say like miss Nicole, like not even looking at me. They knew I walked into the room. They could just sense me, which I don't know if everyone can but certain. So, there's certain, if you're not using a sense, you know, other senses, you know, other areas are more heightened, so.

Heather Newman:  Wow. Yeah. Thanks for that. That I had not heard of that implant before. That's really, really interesting. I figured that, you know, you use many different methodologies for what you do, but I like to sort of dig into the tech too, cause I find that super interesting. Yeah. And you know, I know you are a busy lady and you know, how are, for you, how do you get clients? Is it mostly referral or is it word of mouth or?

Nicole Butler:  Yeah, it's referral mostly, but I mean, I have like a Yelp account for Speech Within Reach. And so I get those calls. Sometimes though with Yelp, what I've found is that there's, they'll be so far away, you know, they'll be like, they're not even like in Los Angeles area. So, but I have speech therapists, other speech therapists, and so they are able to, you know, possibly see them. So it just kinda depends. But referral really seems to be the best. And the schools now, like different schools know me very well. And hospitals and pediatricians and developmental psychologists, so it's, I think referral seems to be the best for my business. Like if you get, if you get injured or you have something medically wrong, you usually want like a personal referral, you know? Especially when it comes to your children.

Heather Newman:  Yeah, for sure. No, that makes sense. That word of mouth that your customers become part of, you know, your family of, and you, you know, just like you said, you, I, you probably work with people a very long time and kids a long time as well. So that's how many, how many kids do you think you've seen over the course of the business?

Nicole Butler:  Oh my gosh, that's a good question. I, Oh my gosh, I have no idea. I would like to try to figure that out. Because it's like how many lives have you affected?

Heather Newman:  Yeah. Right. Yeah. Yeah.

Nicole Butler:  I mean I can probably actually name them all at some point. I would like to kind of just think about it. That's so funny. Yeah, I don't know a lot. A lot.

Heather Newman:  Yeah. Well maybe I think you have a 10 year anniversary coming up soon. Maybe that's something that you could do for that, you know? Yeah.

Nicole Butler:  Yes. Cause I've been doing it since undergrad. 13 kids then and then grad school you are working with patients.

Heather Newman:  Oh gosh. So it's much longer than that, right? Wow.

Nicole Butler:  Oh yeah. Much longer. Yeah. I mean, yeah, definitely.

Heather Newman:  Yeah. Okay. The business has been present here in LA. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But you've been doing this a long time. Yeah. And it's, you know, it's like, we don't always realize that or remember, I think that that one, the pebble, you know, the one thing, you know, it's like, it's not only the, the child, but it's the parents and it's the aunts and uncles and it's the friends and it's the, it's the, it's the, it's a, you know, so it's like time's 300 for you. You know, anybody when you think about it, it's just so cool. I just think what you do is so neat and yeah, I love it. Yeah. So thank you for doing that in the world. You know, it's important. Yeah, absolutely. Yay. And you know, you are busy, you've got clients and all of that and a life and everything. So what are, what are some of your passions outside of work? And I know that I had said, sort of talked about mountain climbing. I know there's a bit of a story there and will you share some of that with us as well?

Nicole Butler:  Yeah, yeah. I love hiking. I did, I summited Kilimanjaro for a nonprofit. I love nonprofits. So, I summited Mount Kilimanjaro and raised $50,000 for the nonprofit, No Limits for Deaf Children. And I let's see, I helped start a nonprofit, reinvigorated it, called Child Success Foundations for families that can't afford speech therapy, occupational therapy, and educational therapy and Jennifer Gardner's our spokesperson, which is very exciting. She's just great. And let's see. I love being outdoors and I also, I love animals. I volunteer at different shelters I love all animals.

Heather Newman:  Yeah. You have a, there was a kitten running around there today, huh?

Nicole Butler:  Yeah. Rescued kitten, a rescue kitten and her mom. Yeah, that, which is, there's been a big change but amazing. They're so loving and sweet. I love traveling. I went to I used to live, I've lived in London and Sweden and this year I went to Croatia and Italy and I've been to India. I went to India for a nonprofit called LIFT Leading India's Future Today. And been to Africa, to four countries in Africa and to Thailand and Korea. I love travelling. I get excited about that. There's just so much to see and do and eat.

Heather Newman:  I hear ya. And eat for sure. I'm, I'm a traveler too, as you know. So yeah, it's, that's a cool thing to do. And so, will you tell everybody your story about your summit?

Nicole Butler:  Oh yeah. Oh girl. Yeah, that's an interesting story. So I, so yeah, so I summited Mount Kilimanjaro and I got HACE, which is high altitude cerebral edema, which is what most people on Everest end up dying from. So once you get it, you die within or you go into coma within 24 to 48 hours and you die typically. And so it takes, for me, it took, we did five day, a five day route on Kilimanjaro and Kilimanjaro it starts out, you know, you're in a rainforest and then you go up on the top it's a glacier, so it's freezing when you get on top. But nobody knew that's what I had. I was just kinda toughing it out. And you know, the symptoms are, I was at the summit so the symptoms are similar to a stroke, you know, you have slurred speech, you can't walk straight and then I had all the altitude symptoms, like bloody nose and vomiting, all the gross stuff. But no one really realized it until I was at the summit and then it was sort of a panic to get me down. And I was blacked out. I don't remember most of it unfortunately. And so they, they had to get me down to base camp, so at Kilimanjaro is around 20,000 altitude and we had to get down to 17,500. And they got me there and they gave me dexamethasone, which is a strong steroid and that really helped that, that helped me at least not have brain damage. I'm pretty sure that would've happened. And then I had to be taken down in a gurney and to get down from Kilimanjaro on a gurney took like 20 hours. And that was four men, you know, it's a third world country, so there's not just a helicopter that's gonna come pick you up. So it was about five or about, yeah, about four guys, like, and just a gurney just taking me down the mountain. And I don't remember till we were probably like 5,000 feet. I started coming to and realizing what had happened and what the heck, you know. So, and then I got down to the hospital on a Kilimanjaro is the highest free standing mountain, so you'd go down to sea level. And my parents were at a hospital, they met me, they were on safari, so they met me and. Yeah, almost, I guess after that I just like had a bad concussion and just had the, the treatments are getting at an altitude and a dexamethasone so yeah.

Heather Newman:  Wow. I mean to summit is one thing and that is, I mean, you got, did you get a chance to go yay? Or was this all happening? You know what I mean? Like, did you get a chance to be like, I'm on the top of the world or you know?

Nicole Butler:  I mean, probably not a solid one. No. Probably not the solid one and I don't have, I have no intention of getting one.

Heather Newman:  Yeah.

Nicole Butler:  I'm okay with not going back.

Heather Newman:  You did it, you did it and you did it. Yeah. I mean, that's so wild and thank goodness for those wonderful people who, you know, took care of you and got you down and quickly and all of that when, you know, it's like so many things can go wrong and maybe you don't have this or have that or whatever. And you know, that's just a, I'm glad you're here. So.

Nicole Butler:  Thanks, me too!

Heather Newman:  Yeah, no kidding.

Nicole Butler:  We couldn't have gone on the Dodgers field, you know?

Heather Newman:  We couldn't have, that is true. That's true. You mentioned your folks. Where did you grow up?

Nicole Butler:  So, I'm from Illinois from a small town of like 5,000. And my cousins have a pumpkin patch near there. So this is pumpkin season right now. It's a really fun time to be there.

Heather Newman:  Nice! Let's give them a shout out. What's the patch called?

Nicole Butler:  It's called the great pumpkin patch. And their Instagram is the 200 acres.

Heather Newman:  Wow. That's so cool. Oh, I haven't, I haven't been yet. Do you have a pumpkin?

Nicole Butler:  I do have a pumpkin. Not from there because they're in Illinois, but they have like the bougie of pumpkin patches. Like Martha Stewart came there like a couple of years. Yeah. And they were invited on the show because they have these rare varieties. They've traveled all around the world. So they have like pumpkin and squash from like France and from Africa and from India, and from every, actually almost pretty much every country in the world. And, and they have, you know, like the bumpy weird ones or like the white one, you know, the, all the different funky ones. And they were on her show and then they got asked to decorate the white house when Obama was president and they've decorated like the Capitol and State. Yeah. It's a pretty cool place.

Heather Newman:  Yeah, no kidding. Say the Instagram again.

Nicole Butler:  The hundred acres. Let me make sure that's right.

Heather Newman:  We'll stick it in the show notes for sure.

Nicole Butler:  The 200 acres, that's what it is.

Heather Newman:  The 200 acres. Okay, cool. What a perfect pre Halloween extravaganza that, that's so cool. That's your family, that's awesome. Oh, that's great. Wow, that's cool. You know I always ask everyone my, my, my ending is always if you would share with us something in your life that sparked you. A Person, place thing moment that really brought you here today. And I know that's a hard one to say one and lots of people say one or sometimes people say more than that or something that you kind of go, you know, yeah. This is the thing that sort of puts me and seats me, right where I am today. If you would share that with our listeners.

Nicole Butler:  Yeah. I'd say, gosh, I, I think a lot of who I am is because of my parents, maybe that's so obvious. But they're like Midwest grounded, rooted, good people. But my mom is very, always been curious. She loves like traveling and like adventure and you know, and she's a super empath and loves helping people. So I think that's why I got into speech therapy and why I'm curious about the world and traveling and why I like love like laughing my parents, I guess they say their secret to marriage, they've been married 40 or so years, 42 years. And they say the secret is that they laugh and make each other laugh. So yeah, I'd say that's a good combination of how I became.

Heather Newman:  Surrounded by laughter and curiosity that does not suck.

Nicole Butler:  Yeah. Lots of love, a lot of love.

Heather Newman:  Lots of love. So awesome. So, when folks are interested in hearing more about Speech Within Reach, we'll put all the ways to connect with Nicole and that organization and her nonprofit in the show notes. So, yeah, I, I love talking to you and it was so great to meet you at the Dodgers game and, and now know you well, that's been a while. So

Nicole Butler:  You too. We got to catch up.

Heather Newman:  I know. Absolutely. That sounds great. Well. and you know, for, for just in general one, one tip about just running a business, I mean, you've been running a business for a while is something that really says if you don't remember anything else or you don't do anything else, maybe this one thing about running a business.

Nicole Butler:  Yeah. I think you have to be passionate and love what you do. Cause that drives you.

Heather Newman:  Yeah, for sure. Come from the heart as it were.

Nicole Butler:  Yes! From heart.

Heather Newman:  Yes. Well, from one Midwestern gal to another. Thank you so much for being on the show. I really appreciate it.

Nicole Butler:  You're welcome. My pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Heather Newman:  You betcha. Absolutely. All right, everybody. Well, that has been another episode of the Mavens Do It Better podcast and here is to a big beautiful day on this blue spinning sphere. Thanks everyone.

Episode 56: Tech Maven Shona Bang

Heather Newman:  Hello everyone. Here we are again for another episode of the Mavens Do It Better podcast where we interview extraordinary experts who bring a light to the world. Where we talk to them about technology and brand and origin stories. And today I am so excited to have Shona Bang on a good friend and colleague from Microsoft. Say hello to the listeners.

Shona Bang:  Yay. Hi everyone. Thanks for having me, Heather.

Heather Newman:  Absolutely. Uh, she is a product marketing manager at Microsoft and she and I did some work together, uh, over the last couple of years working on diversity and inclusion, diversity in tech at Microsoft and she has got a brand new, uh, launching piece in our community that I wanted to talk to her about and also Microsoft Ignite that's coming up. So, why don't we just launch into humans in IT and tell us about that.

Shona Bang:  So, we call it Humans of IT, like Humans of New York, if you're familiar with that series. So it's very much about storytelling, right? Helping people really unlock their tech superpowers, as they call it, to do good in this world. So as you know, we love the diversity in tech things that we've been doing over the past couple of years, but I think now is just the right moment for us to up level this to a whole new level and talk about how do we use technology for humanity and how do we use it for good to solve some of the world's biggest problems, whether it's helping people, um, you know, in under-represented situations. Uh, you know, uh, refugees is another big one that we try to look, um, look into. Um, so you know, it's really how do we use technology to really solve world problems is our key goal with this.

Heather Newman:  That's awesome. And where can everybody find that?

Shona Bang:  So, we have a brand-new community page, aka.ms/humans of it. So check that out. And I think Heather, you can provide a link on there. You know, it's an all new page. We are trying to get new stories. So if anyone is interested in having your story featured, we actually have a call for content now that you could apply to be a guest blogger. Just go to AKA. Dot. MS slash guest bloggers and we'll get in touch.

Heather Newman:  That's awesome. That was so exciting to see and it kind of goes hand in hand with the community mentors program, which started like last year, right?

Shona Bang:  Yup. It started, you know, it's been a journey with the community mentors program. When we first started, we literally had an Excel sheet that we matched everyone randomly and you know it was going good till we got 1500 applications and we were like, okay, we need to scale and scale big. So that's why we partnered with a local Seattle startup called Tribute to build an all new app that's running on Azure, by the way, we're trying to build Power BI in the backend for our analytics portion, but really the app is meant to, you know, empower people to find their own mentors wherever they are at any stage of your life. And you can have up to five mentors at each time. So whether you're trying to pick up skills on public speaking or technical areas, that's absolutely where you would go to connect with people.

Heather Newman:  That's awesome. Yeah, I think that's the cool thing is that I actually just got a mentor at a podcasting conference and I, it's been a long time since I've had a mentor, I will say. And I was so happy and she came, she was, she's a from the LA Times and amazing, you know? It was just so great, sometimes that outside in you don't always see things, you know, and to have someone look at your stuff. She was looking at my podcast and gave me some great feedback and I was just like, Oh, this is amazing, you know? And so I, I'm on Tribute. I went and I was like, I'm, I want a mentor and I want to, you know, have mentees and be a mentor and all of that stuff. So y'all, you have to check this out. Um, the Tribute app and we'll put it in the show notes as well. It's a really, really cool program.

Shona Bang:  I think the best thing is mentors can come from anywhere, right? Like sometimes most unexpected places. And what we really try to do with our mentorship app is storytelling based, so it gets really personal when you can read people's life stories.

Heather Newman:  Yup. Agreed. Yeah. And yeah, it's not just chuck a bunch of skills and stuff like that. Right. It does go deeper and I

Shona Bang:  Life experiences.

Heather Newman:  Yeah. Which is really cool about that app. That's awesome that it's a local Seattle company. That's super cool. I love that.

Shona Bang:  It's totally free, that's the other thing. aka dot MS slash community mentors is how you would join and yeah, you would have to be a member of the Humans of IT community to get on there. But it's a great place to connect with thousands of people literally at your fingertips.

Heather Newman:  Yeah, absolutely. And those of you who are, you know, are, aren't necessarily a part of the tech community yet. It's super easy. Um, it's Microsoft tech community and you go and you sign in and then you can, you know, be a part of Humans of IT. And then also, you can, you know, look at, you know, SharePoint and events and training. There's so much there, you know, so that's a giant, beautiful website that's got so much to offer for everybody. You know, um, it's at anybody and everybody who's working in and around Microsoft products and has an interest and, so lots of really cool things, conversations, blogs, mentorship, all that stuff. So that's awesome. So I want to know, um, I, you, you and I are both, uh, Huskies. We went to UofDub, so back in the day.

Shona Bang:  I went there briefly, just for a certificate for that, but yes, I would call myself that.

Heather Newman:  I went a little bit further back than you did, but, but you also, um, I'm from Chicago, uh, the, uh, Midwest originally. And so you also, you went to Northwestern and you went to Yale. Talk about that. You've got awesome degrees.

Shona Bang:  They're not degrees. They're more like certification programs. Rewind like years and years back, so I'm originally from Singapore. I spent about over five years working at Microsoft Singapore before I finally transferred over to the US. So, it's been about three and a half years here now. And when I got here, I really wanted to learn, you know, on a global level, like tap into these amazing Academy institutions that have all these programs so I did a strategic comms course at UDub. Um, I did a diversity and inclusion certificate with Yale. That was interesting. It was fully online and you would connect with people working on D&I stuff all around the world. Um, they break into groups so it was super interactive. I think they still offer that program if anyone is interested. Feel free to check that out. But yeah, I think, you know, like I'm all about getting new experiences and continually learning from people. So that's something that I've always been passionate about and that's kind of how I got into those.

Heather Newman:  Yeah, that's super cool. I've been to Singapore once, I loved it. It's so beautiful and clean.

Shona Bang:  Well, have you tried our food? I mean our food is the best.

Heather Newman:  I have. Yes. The, what is it? The chili crab

Shona Bang:  Chili crab, chicken rice, like all of that, I think, you know, Crazy Rich Asians movie definitely spotlighted Singapore quite a bit. But you gotta go there to experience it yourself.

Heather Newman:  Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. I actually went to, um, TJ from AvePoint I went to his wedding and uh, yeah, there. And so that was really a special occasion to be there. And they got married on the Island and it was just, uh, yeah. Fantastic. So yeah, it's uh, and I can't wait to go back. It's a good, it's a great place.

Shona Bang:  We have Microsoft Ignite the tour in Singapore happening February. So that's definitely one of our stops if you’re interested check it out.

Heather Newman:  Yeah, absolutely. Do you get back much?

Shona Bang:  Um, not really. Maybe once a year just to see family or go on the Ignite Tours. Tours, you know, it's very consuming as you can tell 30 cities that we're going to cover this year, but very exciting.

Heather Newman:  Wow, that's amazing. So yeah, so will you tell everybody a little bit about what your charter is about, what you do?

Shona Bang:  Like right now?

Heather Newman:  Yeah. Yeah. Your job.

Shona Bang:  Um, so right now I lead the Humans of IT community. It's Brand new. Humans of IT is really focusing on tech for good and tech for humanity. So we're all about spotlighting stories, people, um, you know, examples of how you're using technology to solve world problems. Um, it's kind of a role that kind of, we carved it out ourselves. You know, it's not something you find in the JD. It's literally something that came about because we see that there is a great need for it and Microsoft is a huge proponent of that. Um, a lot of examples are in the media recently as you know, Brad Smith published a book called Tools and Weapons. Uh, it's really all about how do we help people around the world get access to technology because technology is a huge leveler, right? In terms of giving people access and opportunities. Um, and that's something we want to showcase. We want to showcase whatever people are doing in their home countries, whether it's in France or in Tel Aviv or Mumbai, you know, there's huge opportunity and I think, you know, giving them the space to share that is really important.

Heather Newman:  Yeah, absolutely. And so talk about, um, Dona Sarkar and Annie Parker. I know I saw the, when you were, um, announcing this that, uh, you mentioned both of them with a thank you. How were they involved with the, with the, the movement?

Shona Bang:  Yeah, that's a funny backstory to it. So as you know, like they've always been huge supporters of our D and T work that we've been going around D&I. So when we were, you know, re pivoting to this new tribe, they were the first to sign up to be like, I want to be on this. And Dona has been a huge supporter. Like literally even in the early weeks before we got to creating this new thing. Like I met up with her and we talked about the concept and whether this would land with both our IT pro and dev audiences and she was a hundred percent onboard. Any she dragged Annie Parker in, and the next day I get an email saying, Oh yes, Annie Parker's also an exec sponsor. Can you just put her in? Um, and Annie does great work with the Microsoft startups portion of things over, she's based in Australia, but she really does global startup work and you know, we, we see a lot of opportunities in terms of what the startup space is doing. Our Community Mentors program as mentioned, it founded by a Seattle startup. You know, it's women that start up too. So you know, we really want to bring all of these stories to light and giving them that safe space to share that.

Heather Newman:  Yeah. That's awesome. That's so, that's so great. What, what, where did you sort of get started with the D&I? I know your, you know, your, your certificate and all that stuff did, was that something that was, you know what I mean? I mean, I know it's like, okay, it's a sort of silly question, but

Shona Bang:  No, it's not. This is actually a funny story how I got into this. So I have no like professional D&I background or anything. Like I don't have an organizational behaviors cert or whatnot. My background was actually in crisis PR.

Heather Newman:  Okay.

Shona Bang:  So, I spent, well, so before that I was managing technical crisis back in Singapore and went off the technical account manager, moved to the US because nobody wanted this job that was focused on crisis PR management. I did that and I've seen, you know, everything from humanitarian issues to cybersecurity cases. Like you name it, like we've probably dealt with it. And one day you met Anna Chu my coworker who runs community. She came over and she said, Hey, you know, we have this role called women in tech marketing. Would you be interested? I'm like, women in tech? Like, no, I can't just do women, it's gotta be all of it. You know, we're not just one dimensional. We are all of the different identities that make us who we are. So I went to our hiring manager at the time to say, Hey, I'm interested in this, but I want to do it holistically. So let's talk about the intersection of diversity and technology. And that's how diversity and tech came about. Um, and we've always been looking at the D&I from a holistic lens.

Heather Newman:  Yeah.

Shona Bang:  Not only as gender, but also accessibility, you know, um, all the different things we identify with. And that's been my passion from the beginning because, you know, I'm a woman of color. I'm a new immigrant to the US the only one in my family to do it. Um, you know, so all of us have unique stories that just help us, help shape us into who we are. And you know, that's something that I love doing. We did that for almost two years and now I think the time has come for us to take it to the next level. Just talk about humanity as a whole. I love things that have a purpose. You know, work in itself as busy enough. Right. You know, work can be very tiring and exhausting, but I gained a lot of strength working on, you know, issues or things that can help us solve problems in the world. And I think that's something that's a huge motivator for me and my source of energy.

Heather Newman:  Yeah. Multilevel multifaceted for sure. Yeah. That's cool. You know, it's so funny. I worked with you for such a long time. I didn't know that origin story.

Shona Bang:  Really?

Heather Newman:  Yeah, no I didn't actually.

Shona Bang:  I feel like a lot of people do, but yeah, I mean it's funny, like I personally have had encountered all kinds of stories. Like when I first moved to the US like I would have people say like, Oh, like how come your English is so good? You know, things like that. It's all based on bias and perception. Like most people don't even know that in Singapore we are bilingual. Like everyone speaks two languages, you know? And it just an assumption that when someone looks at you as a person of color, they immediately assume you don't speak English fluently or things like that. I was on the PR team at that time and I was like, are you kidding me right now? So it's been a huge learning journey and you know, I feel like there's so much opportunity and space right now. Issues need to be addressed. Like we can't just sweep it under the rug. Like we need to give the community a voice and be real with each other so that change can happen.

Heather Newman:  Absolutely. I agree with you 100% so, so you're a busy gal with a lot of demands and how do you unplug? Where do you, where do you, how do you unplug?

Shona Bang:  I love hiking trips. So going out into the nature, just kind of unplugging from technology and you know, a good spa day never hurts. I go to the spa and like sometimes I drag Anna with me, I'd be like, Hey, we need to like seriously unplug and have a self-care day. So that's what we'll do.

Heather Newman:  Right. Yeah. Wow. What's the last place you went just for fun?

Shona Bang:  Just for fun. Oh my gosh, that's a, that's a good question cause I tend to combine, you know, the work I do with my passion. So I dunno, where did I go? Well I went to the Canadian Rockies with my husband. Yeah, it was fun. We went to see, um, Lake Louise, Banff and just soak in all the nature. I think it's a beautiful time. Oh, we also went up to Vancouver. It's really nice right now in the fall season. We don't get four seasons in Singapore, so that's something I really appreciate.

Heather Newman:  Yeah. How long have you been in Seattle?

Shona Bang:  Three and a half years.

Heather Newman:  Three and a half years. Wow. Okay.

Shona Bang:  Time flies.

Heather Newman:  Yeah. Right. You blink and a lot of big changes for you, so that's awesome and exciting. Yup. You mentioned husband. That's fun.

Shona Bang:  Yeah. Moved across the world, got a brand new job with no PR background and took on a PR job. So anything's possible if you have the right attitude and sponsors and mindset.

Heather Newman:  Absolutely. And so will you talk a little bit about um, Ignite, cause that's been a big piece of what you've been working on as of late and there's a giant program. And would you tell our listeners a little bit about what's going on there too?

Shona Bang:  Yeah, Ignite has been my life right now. It's 20 days away. So as you can tell we are in full steam ahead mode for it. Um, so I am currently leading the diversity and inclusion track. So kind of the last one I'm doing before I fully pivot over to humans of IT. We have a lot planned and a lot going on for this track. We have over 40 sessions. I think it's like 43 at last count, including breakout sessions, theaters, un-conferences. Um, you know, all the topics range the gamut from parents, parenting and tech or you know, women IT pros or you know, neurodiversity like how was it like living with autism or you know, with a diagnosis, right? Loryan Strandt, one of our MVPs is gonna do a session on that as well, living with ADHD and you know, supercharging your career. So, you know, there's just a lot of topics and you know, we just want to create an opportunity for everybody to be able to add it to their session schedule no matter where they are. Because you have no excuse, right? There's five days. We have sessions going on every single day, including daily empower lunches. On Monday we have a CVP panel, it's called future-proofing against bias in tech. I highly recommend that one. Um, on Wednesday we have Haben Girma who is Harvard law school's first deaf blind graduate. She is talking about how she has overcome adversity to become a disability rights lawyer.

Heather Newman:  Wow.

Shona Bang:  I feel very excited about that. We're giving away a copy of her book to the first 400 attendees. So West 224 is our room and all the D&I sessions will be on there. So, make sure to mark it in your calendar. And then we also have unconferences. So, the unconferences are a more interactive, hands-on format in a smaller intimate setting. Um, and we really just want to get people to get together and share best practices. Like how do you survive having a job and parenting, you know, full time. Um, well, what are the mistakes you've made in your career as women in tech, right? Like, how do we get past it? How do we help support one another? So plenty of connection opportunities. Um, I always tell people that, you know, at conferences, a lot of sessions are livestreaming recorded, but the community part is something you can't get on demand. You have to make time for it. So be sure to, you know, pace yourself at plenty of time for networking and meeting people because these are the friendships and the connections you'll take away with you long after the event is over.

Heather Newman:  Yeah, I agree with that. That's amazing and awesome advice. And I also saw that, uh, the student ambassadors are back in full force and there's, I think two, I think that were last year and that are coming back as well. Is that right?

Shona Bang:  Yeah. So two of them were from last year's batch. They will be student advisors to the incoming batch and we've actually expend our student ambassador programs three fold. So we had like five last year, this year we have 15.

Heather Newman:  Oh, my goodness.

Shona Bang:  Um, so yes, and they are from all the local universities in the Orlando area, so university of central Florida, university of Florida and Valencia college. Um, we're really excited because this gives students a firsthand look at what the tech industry is really like, you know, beyond your textbooks. As you know, it's so different when you go into the industry. You know, we're so excited because a lot of that, the, the ones that we invited last year, they actually came back to Microsoft for their summer internship.

Heather Newman:  Oh wow.

Shona Bang:  And yeah, so Rachel is one of them, Chantel's our new ambassador this year. She was also a summer intern this past summer. Milena is another one. She's going to be on the Friday panel. So, you know, I think we really want to make sure that they get a chance to see what it's like for themselves right before they graduate and get to see what working in tech is like. How connections can really help them. Finding the right mentors, you know, people to support them. And you know, there's a lot of companies out there, let's be honest, right, the demand for tech talent is huge. So what can we do to help give them, you know, a good set up so that you know, they know we're here for them.

Heather Newman:  Yeah, absolutely.

Shona Bang:  And then the other one that we're really excited about too is the tech women program. I'm not sure if you've heard about it from last year, Heather.

Heather Newman:  Tell me all about it.

Shona Bang:  So, we ae actually working with a nonprofit, it's a, it's called Tech Women and they actively sponsor women from developing countries to come to the U S for internships, learning programs and things like that. This year we're sponsoring, um, almost 20 tech women from all different countries. And they will be coming and fully engaging as attendees to see what is it like. We want to connect them with people who can then help amplify their profile. In fact one of them was here last year and she really wanted to be back this year. We've invited her to all Microsoft Tour Paris, cause she is from Algeria, she also speaks French. Um, and we just want to give them that platform to share their story. She's an assistant professor in computer science and outside of her day job she does a lot of volunteering for women in technology. And we also had a really happy story last year. One of the tech women we brought over to Microsoft Ignite, she became a regional director this past year simply because of the, you know, the people she got to meet and they helped to raise her visibility cause she was a CEO of an IOT company doing amazing stuff but nobody knew her. Nobody knew her outside of Algeria. So when she came to a big global conference, she met all these amazing MVPs who are like, Oh, you should absolutely be on this program. And it just happened.

Heather Newman:  That's so cool. Yeah, I think so. Like I interviewed all the, um, most of the student ambassadors last year on a podcast and I want to catch them again this year for sure. Especially with Elizabeth and Genevieve and saying, Hey, you know, like what's happened in the last year since you did this? You know? So that's super, super cool.

Shona Bang:  Yeah. Some of them are doing really amazing stuff, like one of our student ambassadors actually built prosthetic limbs for her father because there was nothing in the market that could suit his needs. So she just went on and built it. Like that's how amazing it is. In fact I should connect you with her because I think her story is a pretty incredible one.

Heather Newman:  Cool, yeah, no, I'd love that. Yeah. I plan to, and I think many of you already know this already, but I will be a computer community reporter at Ignite, so I'm going to be running around and probably.

Shona Bang:  Be busy.

Heather Newman:  Yeah, running. Catting around the a diversity and inclusion lounge for sure. Cause it's a passion of mine as well. And I've loved, I loved working with you on all of this as well.

Shona Bang:  Likewise, get your comfy shoes on.

Heather Newman:  I know, right? No, I actually just bought a couple of pairs. So, um, so that I'm ready to go. And um, the pre-day, will you talk a little bit about the pre day?

Shona Bang:  Yes. So the pre-day is a full day program. Last year we started from noon, this year we're starting at 8:00 AM.

Heather Newman:  Whoo. Okay.

Shona Bang:  Yes, we are, you know, having a full day of jam-packed sessions. Just there's so much content we would love to showcase. So it's a full day from 8:00 AM to 7:00 PM and then we have the evening reception. So let me just kind of tell you what is some of the core content we'll be featuring. So, one of them involves a speaker Deena Pierott. She's the founder of iUrban Teams, a nonprofit that helps underrepresented communities gain access to technology, especially youth. Um, I met her at um, a women in tech event in Portland. And she invited me to speak at Starbucks and it's kind of interesting how the full circle has come about. And I was like, your topic is great. And she's actually gonna talk about the intersection of race and gender. That's powerful because a lot of people tend to think of these categories as linear, like you're either a woman or someone of color like that, but no one ever really talks about this, you know, it's an intersection and what that means for people who cut across both those categories. Right. And she's gonna have an amazing panel that we pulled together. There was just a prep call this morning. Um, and everyone's is going to share their true story, you know, like real authentic stories about how, what is it like being a person of color, female or gender non-binary even, and you know, what is the environment that we need to create so that we're all included and have a voice.

Heather Newman:  Yeah, absolutely.

Shona Bang:  So, that's going to be the full morning part. And then we have Dona Sarkar, of course doing a neuro-diversity as a super power panel. Um, a lot of amazing panelists she's invited to kind of talk about neuro diversity as a whole and how that's not a disability, but really a superpower if managers just know how to work with that, right? To bring out the best in these individuals. And then we port over to another speaker Kyla Mitsunaga, she's a TedTalk speaker and also a published author. We'll be giving away a copy of her book to every attendee as well. Um, she talks about, you know, communication skills with versus at somebody, how to collaborate. And she did a session at Microsoft Ignite Tour Amsterdam last cycle, and she talked about the pursuit of happiness. Like, you know, this is something that's elusive. Her session was packed because I think in tech especially, everyone's trying to look for happiness. Like what is our meaning and purpose here? How do we use our skills for good? And that's just something that she'll be doing in her session. So really looking forward to that. It's going to be great.

Heather Newman:  That's cool. Wow. Uh, how, how close are, well ignite is sold out.

Shona Bang:  Ignite is sold out, but you can still add the pre-day if you're registered. I think we have a couple of seats left. If people do want to join in, um, it's not too late, just do it ASAP. And then for the evening reception, we have, you know, um, our DJ from last year, she's a violinist who also does deejaying together. I don't know. It sounds amazing.

Heather Newman:  She was awesome. Yeah.

Shona Bang:  Yeah. We invited her back. Oh, we also have a Disney caricaturist who's going gonna draw your superhero alter ego. Not even kidding we hired the caricaturist from Disney.

Heather Newman:  That's fantastic. Why not? Yeah. Last year it was a calligraphist. Right. Um, that was, and you could give any quote and yeah, it was, so that was, I still, I have mine, I'm looking at it, it's on my bookshelf over there.

Shona Bang:  Me too. We loved that. But I think this year wanted to do something different and just have people think about what will your alter ego be if you weren't afraid, you know?

Heather Newman:  Mmhm, yeah, no, absolutely. And I bet I'm, I'm sure that there's going to be some lovely giveaways and fun stuff like that too. Those are always pretty, pretty yummy from, uh, uh, from what I see from what we had last year. So

Shona Bang:  I have to tell you this year's like top giveaway is going to be a custom Lego set called the modern inclusive workplace. So I custom designed, it to me three months. Yes. And we have limited sets that we'll give away. There's an interactive game at the humans of it lounge, it's called the humans of IT race, kind of a play on the word human race and it's an interactive, um, AR VR game. And you would form a team of four, go to that game lounge and you have to race like with your arms, so that's inclusive of, you know, people who are in wheelchairs, they can participate as well. Um, the, the, the top five teams with the fastest timing per day will get this limited edition Lego set.

Heather Newman:  That's fantastic. Oh, I can't wait to see it. That is,

Shona Bang:  Oh, you have to win it, Heather. Get your shoes on.

Heather Newman:  I know. I'm like, yeah, really. I'm like, yeah, well we'll see if I get in there, I'm going to be running around a little bit. But yeah. Oh that's so cool. It's not, I mean, it just, it keeps building, you know, which is so wonderful and thank you for all your beautiful work that you've done on this, uh, with the teams and, and in conjunction with the events teams. It's really cool to see and it's really cool to see how the entire, all of Microsoft, you know, just from the global D&I perspective from the IT pro community and everybody coming together to really put a lot of these issues, mental health, burnout, you know, tech and intersectionality, all of these things out in the forefront for all of us to talk about together. You know, creating that belonging that we all really want. Right?

Shona Bang:  Yeah, we love it. I think, you know, Ignite, it's kind of like a one big party, you know, you think like everyone around the world coming together and just really celebrating this amazing community. Like you're a part of community, Heather. Like, I love the tech community just cause there's so many passionate people doing amazing things and you know, the one time in a year where we all get together and just celebrate each other.

Heather Newman:  Yeah, absolutely. It's, and it's huge, you know, and, and so much of it is also, you know, those who can't come, you know, there's somebody was saying, you know, don't have FOMO. And I was like, you know, there's probably some people who have what JOMO like the joy of missing out cause they're going to get to watch in their bathrobes, and not having hurt, hurting feet. Um, but you know, yeah, it is a big wonderful event and a, it's going to be awesome. So I also, you know, so um, growing up in Singapore, I wanted to track back to that for a second and you know, for you growing up there, um, how, how did, how did you get like the, like into like the decision for tech for you?

Shona Bang:  Oh, you mean like when I graduated, how to I decided to join tech? That's an interesting story. Like, I was going to join a cosmetics company cause I participated in marketing challenge. And they were like, yeah, you should join us. And I told my dad, my dad's a long time IBM executive, way that when he's now retired. But he was the one who told me like, why would you join a company? And you know, like why would you join a company that doesn't directly work in tech because when you do work in tech, you get to influence every other industry out there. And that just like really sunk in for me. And I felt like, wow, like that's true. Like I could be at the forefront and helping build solutions that will impact every organization no matter where you are. Um, and that's not to say there's anything wrong with working in any specific industry. But I just personally love being in tech because we're at the forefront of cutting technology and we get to help have a say in what, what gets built, you know, how do we use our solutions. How do we communicate that to people. And it's just been so rewarding for me. I feel like I'm learning something new every day. And the biggest draw for in tech for me that I think would apply to most people is that no matter where you are on this journey, you can always join in because tech is always evolving. You're never too late to join tech.

Heather Newman:  Yeah, agreed. I mean, if I can teach my mom how to use Instagram, anything can happen, you know?

Shona Bang:  Right. Or be like the tech support back home with everybody, no matter what your role is.

Heather Newman:  Oh yeah, absolutely. The phones and the printers and everything get shoved my way. But I'm sure that's any of us in tech for sure.

Shona Bang:  I know, I'll be like, I don't work in that area, but okay, fine. I'll try. I'm sure I can help you pair your Bluetooth to your laptop.

Heather Newman:  Absolutely. Oh my God. That's funny. Well, so my last question is always, you know, a what if, what, what's that spark or a moment or person or you know, that really got you to be where you are today. If you can pinpoint one that you would share with our listeners.

Shona Bang:  I think, you know, I want to say there isn't one specific person. I think there's always been a group of people just throughout my life and career so far that have really helped me. I think if I trace it way back when, like when I was in high school, I remember one of my teachers that the biggest thing he said was, there are many routes to the same path. So you know, there's not one way to success. Like there's so many ways you can get there, right? And nobody has a fixed path. Like your life is always evolving and you just don't know what's going to happen. You just have to make the most of it and just be earnest and sincere when you live. That's something that I've always taken throughout my career. When I think about, you know, what is the thing that I want to do? I want to do something with purpose, with meaning. I want to leave a good impact on society, right? We need to leave the world a better place than when we first found it. It's one of my personal mantras too. But you know, like starting out in Microsoft, I joined Microsoft through their graduate program so back when it was called the mock program, I think some people might be familiar. Um, I had an amazing manager back then who really believed in me. And when I said like hey, you know, I love Singapore, but I've been born and raised here. I think I'm ready to go onto a global stage and do something like large, like massive scale. He was so supportive, like every time we had a business trip he would send me and be like, Hey, go there, go meet people, go find the connections you need to make it work. And like it did, it paid off and you know, when I came here, you know, doing a job that was really hard. Like I didn't know anybody when I first moved here. You know, I have to learn everything from scratch, build a network, build a community. Um, you know, it's kind of ironic like coming to a place where I had no community and then building one.

Heather Newman:  Your DIY, DIY community,

Shona Bang:  Right? Like the number of people I knew in Seattle was like, I could count with one hand. Literally, um, and you know, coming here and getting to meet so many people since I will say Twitter is a huge help. Um, I wasn't even a big Twitter user way back when, like it's not a big thing in Singapore, but apparently everyone in the U S here is huge on Twitter.

Heather Newman:  Yup.

Shona Bang:  One time I asked my husband like, why does everyone in the U S have like so many things to say? And we didn't want to say it publicly, but I see, I see value in it. I think there's a whole reason why, because you know, it's a platform, right? It's, it's a way to share your voice, your principles and meet tons of people from there. Um, so yeah, I think, you know, having managers that are supportive, and right now my manager, Jeff, shout out to Jeff, he's probably gonna listen to this, cause he listens to all our content.

Heather Newman:  And he's awesome.

Shona Bang:  You know, he's, yeah, he's been so supportive, you know, in terms of, you know, working through the repivoting and transition and really supporting what we need to do, right. To make this real and authentic for our community. I think this team, if anything, and you've worked with many of us, Heather, you know, our team loves the community. We love people. And the work that we do, like we, it's draining. I mean, it's exhausting, but we get energy from it because we know the people who will benefit from it. And that's what we're here for. We're here for all of you.

Heather Newman:  Yeah, no, that's uh, yeah, I mean, all of you and you, you're so effervescent, you know, and just so passionate and, yeah, no, it's true. And everybody who works on that team is that way as well. And I, you know, I'm not going to speak for the entire community, but I'm going to say thank you, but I'm going to say thank you because when, when we all talk about it, that's what we talk about is the passion and the goodness and yeah, we, I mean, it's about helping each other. And, and trying to figure out stuff together. And I think we do, we all do that really well and you all lead so well and listen too, you know, um, and that's a big part of it, you know?

Shona Bang:  Yes. Team effort and, you know, I think there's just so much we can learn from each other. I would say maybe connecting people is one of my superpowers. I should write that down somewhere. What's your super power? Right. Everybody has superpowers.

Heather Newman:  Yeah, definitely. I, yeah, I think, you know, for me, connecting is one of them for sure. And, and just sort of being able to sort of understand people fairly quickly, you know? Um, I think that's my background in theater.

Shona Bang:  And you're a good listener.

Heather Newman:  Yeah. I try, you know, I, that was something I work on deep listening, you know, sometimes you need to just be quiet, you know, and take it in.

Shona Bang:  Yeah, actually, take it in, not just kind of letting it just swish by you. I think that's a huge skill that's getting lost today. Right? Everyone's like bombard information all the time. But you know, taking time to really process what people are saying and internalize it and come up with a thoughtful response. That's a huge, like humans of IT skill.

Heather Newman:  for sure. For sure. We're going to have to get more buttons so you know,

Shona Bang:  Oh yeah. I'm all buttoned Out. Like I'm telling everybody, no more buttons cause we ordered it like 40,000 buttons. It's the last cycle. I have had enough of buttons. We made it digital so we partnered with this artist, you can go to AKA Dot MS slash diversity superpower. You can have your own AR filter with the button wall.

Heather Newman:  That's right. That's awesome. I'm looking at the ones on my refrigerator right now, so I have mine up for sure. So that was a cool, cool thing last year. So, awesome, yay. Well you are, like I said, an effervescent force of nature and I love working with you and I love talking to you. So I really, Shona, I appreciate you coming on the show today and sharing all of that of what's coming on, uh, for Ignite and humans of IT. It's so exciting. So thank you so much for coming.

Shona Bang:  Thank you! And we'll see you in Orlando.

Heather Newman:  Yes, I will see you soon with bells on, as they say. So thanks so much.

Shona Bang:  Thanks Heather. Talk soon.

Heather Newman:  Alright, you're welcome. Folks, that has been another episode of the Mavens Do It Better podcast, and here's to a big beautiful day on this blue spinning sphere. Thanks.

Episode 55: Tech Maven Maarten Visser

Heather Newman:  Hello everyone. Here we are for another episode of the Mavens Do It Better podcast where we interview extraordinary experts who bring a light to our world, mavens in our world today. I'm super excited to have a wonderful colleague on, uh, Maarten Visser who is coming to us from, are you in Den Hauge in the Netherlands? Is that right?

Maarten Visser:  Yes, well actually very close to the Hauge. It's just this, you could say like a server. Yes. The Hauge, the Netherlands.

Heather Newman:  Yes. I've actually been there, believe it or not. So, um, I took a driving trip on a site visit and I drove there and I went to Gauda or Gouda as we say here, the place that makes the yummy cheese. So I know your area very well actually.

Maarten Visser:  That's good. Yeah. Well, I'm, I'm super excited to be here in your show and, uh, have a, have a nice conversation.

Heather Newman:  Absolutely. Yeah. Uh, Maarten and I have known each other for a long time now. Um, both working in technology together in SharePoint land together. And, um, I would say digital transformation land together, uh, seeing each other at many events. Um, I can't, I'm trying to figure out when we met, it's been awhile. I'm trying, I was trying to think about that and I know it's at some event, but it must've been somewhere in Europe. I'm sure. So yeah.

Maarten Visser:  But it could also be like a SharePoint, um, a SPC event in the US, that, that, that might also be one of the first acquaintances.

Heather Newman:  Yeah, absolutely. So, um, so yeah, so, and, and something else to announce that's really fun, uh, is that Maarten and I are both, um, community reporters for the upcoming Microsoft Ignite Conference, which is the largest conference for IT pros in the world. And that is coming up, uh, starting on November 4th and Maarten, will you tell everybody what, what the community reporter uh, dealio is? Will you tell everybody about that?

Maarten Visser:  Um, you mean like what the story is about us being called Ignite community reporters? Yeah. Well. Um, I guess we're, we are part of the live stream, um, where, uh, it's multi day and we will be interviewing people about certain, uh, technologies and, and, and certain things happening in the community or specific Microsoft events happening. And, um, we are out there doing interviews with Microsoft employees and MVPs and getting some quality content out of whoever we're talking to.

Heather Newman:  Yeah. And attendees and sponsors and all as well. I believe. So it's, it's sort of a, we'll, we'll have, um, scheduled things that we're doing, uh, during the live streaming and, you know, catching sessions. But, um, it's also, um, part of the community reporter charter to, you know, capture as much content and talk to as many people as possible. And, uh, uh, Maarten and I, uh, so gosh, I think that was SharePoint conference maybe when you brought your kit. And we were at, uh, Microsoft Teams mixer and, uh, Maarten grabbed me and said, Hey, do you want to be on a video? And I said, sure. And I was so impressed with your setup, um, and how you do things that you made it look effortless. I thought. So how long have you been doing video and that kind of thing?

Maarten Visser:  Uh, well I've, well if we go back down that road, I would like be an 11-year-old getting a camera from my father. And uh, just, um, back then when I was 11 the video cameras were the size of uh, wow. Uh, like the, of the, almost the same size as the professional ones now that you have, that you're using TV. So, so as, as an 11 year old, I would hit the streets with my friends and we, we put stickers on the camera from a famous TV show, uh, locally. And then we, we, even then, it was so funny. It's, so I'm talking early eighties here. Where we were interviewing people and they actually thought that we were the real deal, uh, interviewing them for the show. Because it was also a [inaudible] show and just walking the streets with a big camera made you look authentic and being from TV. So it goes back that far. And then when I was a teenager, I, I was always the funny guy who was traveling with a video camera when we actually went, even with that, like for parties or, or specific events. So I have a long range of, of videos that are, I was doing. We were also making fun. So like we're, we're like recording sketches and these kinds of things, but regarding video like doing videos and, uh, recording videos for, for Microsoft events. It started in 2015 when I took that, I started to, to, to trial and then do that seriously. Uh, but, um, I, I tried some, some stuff, but it didn't really took off and I, I ignored it again. And then about three years ago, um, yeah, it was it or two, two years ago when, when LinkedIn video was announced, I thought, this is gonna be my platform. Um, two, two years ago, and that was like Ignite 2017, uh, then I really started doing that actively and since then I am also having a weekly or monthly videos or, and when there's an event or was something an important announcement happened, uh, I started doing the recording. So, yeah, more seriously for the past two years.

Heather Newman:  Yeah. That's super cool. Yeah. My dad had a VHS camera that he would carry on his shoulder and he recorded all of my, you know, plays and you know, musicals in high school and I give it up to that man and I, it's probably the reason his shoulder hurts him to this day. Oh my goodness. I know what you're talking about. Yeah, yeah. That's super cool. Yeah, I it, it was just, it was neat to, it's always neat to see how other people, you know, do capture and set things up and whether you're podcasting or whether you're capturing, you know, videos and, you know, the, I think in, in marketing and in the world, like these bite-sized videos are de rigueur, if you will. Um, you know, just to grab some awesome content and put it out there. Um, that's, that's super cool. And, and your background, um, you were a communications major in business, back in the day as well, right?

Maarten Visser:  Yeah, that's correct. Yeah. So, I, as like I told today to some, uh, I was at the Microsoft Teams Airlift event today, the first day here in Amsterdam. And, um, for some reason I started chatting with one of the mics with one of the employees who is responsible for the design of Microsoft Teams and all the interaction, UX, and, and, and for some reason, I also started talking about my, my original university that I went to. And, um, the funny story there was that the year that I got in, uh, was the year that that HTML and World Wide Web basically, uh, was announced when it was, became available, HTML 1.0. Uh, so that, that was related to, so, so that's, that's a long time ago. But communications like the first year I started to do that, that, that at, uh, the university. It was a very modern school and, and they changed, um, the module about, uh, developing video texts systems. I don't even know if that would resonate in the US. But these were these systems we could, you could have on your TV or you could dial into them with your modem and you had the number system to navigate to pages. And that, that, that first year they changed that to developing HTML pages. So I always refer to myself as like 50% geek, 50% businessperson, so, so that, that will never leave. So I, I love technology and then finding the boundaries and what can be done and achieved with cutting edge technology that the I, that, that will ever go away.

Heather Newman:  Yeah. And you started in SharePoint land, what, around 2001, 2003? I'm not sure. When was your start in the SharePoint world?

Maarten Visser:  Uh, actually 2000. Yeah. I, I my, so my first job was in 1999, uh, when I left school and I started to work at, um, a Microsoft System Integrator. And actually my, my first job there was to develop their internal intranet. And so I, I digged into what do I have with this Microsoft technology that I can use to build an intranet? And all through some months we, we build the system or I mostly build the system using site server and web access like 5.0 or something and I combine those two. And then at that some point, uh, I became a, well, I, I business consultant, technical consultant uh, building, uh, these kinds of things like workflows on Outlook and, and, and, and portals using this. And then in 2000 like a year later, I got my hands on the Tahoe, the SharePoint 2001 BETA. And then that's when it started.

Heather Newman:  Right. And you've been deep ever since.

Maarten Visser:  I do really have like every imaginable role in the SharePoint project. Uh, and from, from, um, mostly of course the most value I can provide as a, as a business consultant, really transforming organizational needs to, uh, to, to the, to the technology that could be used to, to support those needs. But I've done deep IT pro, farm, multi-farm, clustered sequel installations. I've done project management, I've done, um, solution architectures, migrations, any possible thing. Um, I stopped doing most of those because yeah, like most people, some things you can do pretty well and some you're not that good at. Um, but yeah, it's been a while and it's been an amazing journey. Most of the time it was not feeling like work, but just building cool stuff with, with nice technology. Um, of course we are surrounded with SharePoint workflows or InfoPath, uh, there's, there's always multiple loads attached to it, but yeah, SharePoint has been the North star in almost everything I've done for the past 20 years.

Heather Newman:  Yeah, I hear ya. It's definitely been a star in my life as well, for sure. So, and you and I have a, a mutual love of music, dance music specifically. And I was seeing that you were building an eCommerce platform for dance music. What was that all about?

Maarten Visser:  Yeah, so, so I was talking 1993 when I had my first year of my, uh, a communications, communication systems, uh, major, uh, after doing one year of marketing, commercial economy. Uh, which, uh, I didn't like because I also had to do business administration and that's not me. So, um, so in 1994, um, we had this, well I was reading Wired and, and, and, uh, getting all psyched up about this global village and what we could do with it. And, and back in those days, I was part of the, what we called house music. Um, when I was like 15 years old, house music here in the Netherlands was, was, was really like the underground, uh, movement that just really like, it had the feeling like it was like an alternative movement. And it was, was a great time to be as a teenager where we were, we had these, uh, illegal raves and we had these big first parties.

Maarten Visser:  Uh, and, and of course I had these beautiful computers sitting at home. I, I was a Commodore guy. So, uh, back in those days I had a Commodore Amiga and I was listening to that music since 1988 when first we had a New Beats coming from Belgium. And then we got these, For the Vibes from Chicago. Uh, yes, so much great music. So that, that's the music I loved and I grew up with. And of course when I was like 15 years old, I go to my first parties. I was hooked from the start. Um, but then of course you had these trackers, these, these, these, uh, uh, sequence, uh, where you could load in samples on your, on your Amiga and you could start making music with them by, uh, sequencing those, uh, those beats and making your own samples. And of course sampling all the records and the old hip hop and all those kinds of these kinda things.

Maarten Visser:  So, um, at one point we, I think, I think it was like 15 years old and we had this party at school and, um, I, somebody said, I heard you talk about doing music with your computer, could you make like a theme for, for, for the school party. So then I, well got a little bit more serious about it and I made this, this, this track, this, this well house music track on with some samples, Mellow Yellow about the name of the party and some funny things. And, um, and then they, of course, they played it during the party and everybody was like, wow! And you, wow, you have to do more of this and the good. And well, OK. So then, um, at some point I start doing that more and more and that, uh, people were dragging me to clubs and with these tapes, you know, the old, the real TDK, um, well, what is it?

Maarten Visser:  Cassette tapes. And we, we get those two DJs and at some point, yeah, I even landed a record deal and that was like, yeah, I was in this industry for a couple of years doing techno music and then later you like the, the harder, I actually had a one song which is, but at some point in 1994, um, we were like looking at how hard could you make this music? Like what are the limits, how much BPM can people take? And we were, we were heading to this like 200 BPM, which was like hardcore house music or gabber it was called. And um, I had friends of mine really got into that and then I also started experimenting with it and actually the track I'm most famous for is really a hardcore track. That's funny. That's a funny story.

Heather Newman:  That's hilarious. That makes sense to me knowing you and when we are at these events that we definitely enjoy a dance floor. So yeah. But I didn't know the whole backstory. That's amazing. Wow.

Maarten Visser:  Yeah. I have a lot of friends who are DJs and it was very bad for, for, for, for my, the 1994 I have failed school miserably, uh, because I had all these, uh, DJ friends and they, I got like, like from, from Thursday to Sunday, I got calls like, Hey do you want to, join us at this party? I have free tickets or come and join me to Germany or Austria. They have to play everywhere. And they're always like, do you want to join me or have some fun? And that's pretty hard to say no when you're a 16, or 17 year old by then.

Heather Newman:  Yeah, no, absolutely. Yeah. No, I, I definitely, um, yeah, I've been to my fair share of those parties and raves myself. So yeah. But yeah, I think my, my, I think my influence definitely was the deep house that was coming out of Chicago cause I went to high school just outside of Chicago. And so I was exposed to that music fairly early too and just loved it, you know. Um, I think, uh, so Miguel MIGS was here recently and Mar, um, is it Mar, I think you say Marquez Wyatt. Um, he was here as well playing, so yeah, I, uh, they're resident DJs here, which is kind of amazing, but you know, that's kind of Los Angeles if you will. But uh, yeah, it's super cool. Um, wow. I didn't know all that. Thank you for sharing that with everybody. That's cool. Um, you know, I always like to ask folks about technology and obviously we've been talking about tech anyway, but I think, um, what is something that like, uh, I don't know, maybe, and maybe we should talk Teams for a minute because that seems to be the hot, hot new thing, um, that's coming out of Microsoft, but, you know, what is it that you really like about Teams since we're sort of all up in that right now as is it, is it, what strikes you as the best thing about it?

Maarten Visser:  Well, can I, I'm going to say three things just to, because yeah. Um, so, so the first one is always being into SharePoint there's this, there were user adoption limitations to SharePoint due to the fact that like the average user had serious problems navigating multiple sites, through the web browser. So, one of the success points of Teams is of course the ability to have a desktop app with, um, a, a more clear way of navigating multiple collaboration environments. And now that people are used to, uh, Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp and navigating multiple group threads and, and, and, and conversations, they, they got this, this, this, um, way of navigating, uh, multiple contexts, a context to collaborate in their school context or work or family. Um, so that, that grew over the past years. And there's, there's, there's volumes of people on both Facebook and WhatsApp, so it's like everybody in the Western world at some point has now currently has a smartphone and is using Facebook Messenger or WhatsApp or maybe a similar, if you're in, in China, it's, uh, one of those, uh, Chinese platforms, WeChat, I think is very big there. So everybody knows how to navigate group conversations now and now we have this brilliant desktop app which allows us to, to, to navigate those, those collaboration environments. And of course these are still in the leaf. Everything is SharePoint. All your files are stored in SharePoint. Then of course you have a persistent chat put on top of it, which is great. So, but that is a very important from a UX perspective that that brings a lot of adoption and that's, that's why it's the most successful application ever for Microsoft regarding growth. Basically due to this number one fact. And I'm really was naming the second point I want to point out which is mobile. So the fact that we haven't or have this, this, this application in our, in our pockets and we can do the same quick navigation and jump towards a specific collaboration context and, and, and, uh, open a document, have a conversation. I, that's extremely powerful. And sometimes even, um, not being given enough attention, how important it is to have this great mobile app that that does it. So, and the third thing would basically be the fact that we're now able to, to collaborate into contacts, which is project contacts or a campaign or a department or a knowledge area to have those key collaboration dimensions basically and have everything like chat and files and applications in that context.

Heather Newman:  Yeah, absolutely. I agree with your three points whole heartedly. Yeah, I do. I love it. I, I, it's one of those where, um, I was, I was having that, that fatigue of trying to figure out who was communicating to me where, because you know, there's just like, you don't know who uses Skype, like desktop, versus Facebook or I used to use Skype desktop for so much because I could, you know, you know, talk to someone like you that I, we weren't using our cell phones to call, right. So we could get each other on Skype and people were talking to their families or, you know, people from far away. And then WhatsApp came and totally helped that. And, but I, I mean, I get business conversations happening on Facebook Messenger, on WhatsApp, uh, you know, all over the place and, and used to be messenger and all of that. But I love that the, even like sort of, I, I tend to push people into Teams because that's what I, what I use. And even folks who are sort of fairly, you know, say Google centric or other things, like they're willing to join a Teams as a guest, you know, and interact with me there and have the chats there. And it is the mobile experience for me as well. I mean, you, you're a consultant and I'm, I run a consultancy and a software business and for me, when I travel, I try to do as much as I can on my phone. I have a Surface Pro 6, but which I love as well. But to me, if I can run my business mostly from my iPhone X, I'm very happy, you know. Uh, what do you travel with when you go, um, traveling? What's, what is, what's your, what's your phone and what's your, um, like laptop?

Maarten Visser:  So, my, my laptop actually is an HP Spectra. Um, and I, this is actually my third one, I think. Yes. Um, I like it. It's, so it's a 13 inch. Um, currently it, I know it's always the i7 and, and 60 gigs of Ram and that, but it's, it's, it's very, I like it also for the looks. So I'm also like the geek who chooses his devices sometimes based on the looks. Um, but of course it's also splendid, very reliable machine because the last one, if a laptop last for almost three years, that's special. That's, I, I, I in the past, I have laptops that were done in, in, in, in well, uh, one year, one and a half, but for, and of course what we do to do our office DOSC, um, with current, um, chip technology, uh, it, it's makes more sense that they last for three years. But, um, yeah, it's very valuable and I liked them. I have a black one with, with copper on it. It almost looks like Rose gold, but it's copper. Uh, so, uh, yeah, that's my laptop. And currently I'm actually carrying with me two iPhone devices. And, and that's, that's that of course that, ooh, that's actually an interesting story to share. So I have the iPhone X, iPhone 10, for two years now. And uh, two weeks ago I got the iPhone 11 Pro Max as a new friend and of course I took that for, for the camera abilities mostly being, so it's having this great camera in your pocket. And I nowadays always travel with um, um, like, um, what's the name? So I a thing, a rake that I can put it in my camera with a tripod, so I just carry now a tripod and a, and a rig that I can put in there and start instantly record whatever I'm doing. And of course having this camera is great to do so.

Maarten Visser:  And now I have a bigger screen, so bigger view finder because a lot of videos that I've done was just using the front face of the camera, which if you're doing YouTube videos at a thousand ADP, that's most, that's fine enough. Or for LinkedIn that's, that's good enough. And having the viewfinder, like, like you said, like I liked your setup because it looked so easy, is that one of the things that I have been doing through trial and error is, is finding a setup, which if I just hit record, it would work. So within one minute I haven't timed it, but in one minute I can put my phone in the rig, put it on the tripods, uh, put in, uh, uh, wired lever to put on my, uh, on my coat and it will work flawlessly. There's, there's not so much things that can go wrong and I can see myself on, on the screen. So I know my positioning and I'm off to go. So in a minute, two minutes, three minutes, I'm ready to, to go and have a semiprofessional recording. Uh, and that's, that's important. That's why I also use these, these phones. But the funny thing is, of course, I was planning to replace my old iPhone with the new one. And, and pretty quickly after a couple of days, I felt like, no, I don't want to let go of this one. I want to keep both. And, uh, one of the funny reasons is the app that I'm using to do recordings, Filmic Pro also allows to use a second phone to do a secondary screen. And I've been doing that with an iPad, but then I have to get out my iPad and now I have just the phone, which can also be the viewfinder. So I can use the, the camera on the back, which would even have more quality and use the view finder on my, on my second phone. The second thing is that I'm starting to use the big one, the Max, the 11 Pro Max as a, as a PDA. So in the past I have always been traveling with a phone and a PDA that even goes back like, like 25 years, maybe even longer when I had this Scion 3a. Um, which, which was like this foldable, uh, device that allowed me to do note-taking and have my agenda and contacts in it. Yep. And ever since I had it at some point I had these were replaced by Microsoft mobile devices. So I had, I had multiple of these, these Microsoft, uh, mobile devices to do the same workload and like taking notes. And at some point they had pens and I did writing on it or, but mostly it's just note taking and agenda, uh, which was pretty crappy in the beginning days. Of course, if you had a traditional Nokia phone, these agendas were very crappy and forget about note taking. Um, so of course we, we with iPhone, uh, at some point you could do note taking there. But so, the interesting thing that's happening now is that I'm traveling with two iPhones and I'm usually using one primarily as a PDA and a camera.

Heather Newman:  Right. Wow. That's so interesting. Yeah. You just, I'm like Hmm. You just made me go Hmm. Cause I, yeah that 11 does look pretty sweet. So yeah, we'll have to see about that. But um, no, that's super cool. Thank you for sharing that. Cause I think we're always sort of looking for the better way. And I know that, you know, I, I haven't really dug into the whole Microsoft Surface announcements that came out, but all of that was really exciting as well and puts another beautiful wrench into, um, what we all have, I think coming into the holidays for sure .

Maarten Visser:  For sure. Yeah. And I can imagine that one of these phones will get replaced by the Neo or Duo that does make sense. So yeah, probably one of these phones is going to be replaced next year by the Surface Duo.

Heather Newman:  Yeah. I, yeah, I know. I can't wait to kind of get my hands on some of that stuff too. So. Well, and so one of the other things that Maarten and I were talking about and kind of going back to our positions as community reporters is, um, you know, we, he and I both I think have been talking to other people who've done in the past and watched other friends do it in the past. And, um, it's a, it's a job where you're running a lot, uh, during the week. And, um, we decided, we talked the other day and, um, we said, hey, you know, we're both doing this and we both enjoy each other's company. And so, Maarten and I are gonna do some teaming up, um, for the community reporter, uh, positions we have and see if we can help each other and, you know, with setups and, and, you know, interviewing people and all of that stuff. And I'm really, thank you for saying yes to that I'm really excited about it, by the way.

Maarten Visser:  Me too. Yeah. I'm really much looking forward to it and, uh, whether it's just one primary goal in this is to make it a good show. Right? And that's a, also having a buddy to, to, to do some, uh, psyching up before the interview. Yay, you can do it! Go Wild! So that's kinda fun for sure.

Heather Newman:  Yeah, I'm excited about that. And working with all of our community reporter buddies. There's 10 of us, by the way. And, uh, if you follow myself or Maarten on social media, we've posted, um, lots of information about the other community reporters and there's actually a Twitter list on my, uh, @creativemavens account, so you can just easily follow all the Ignite reporters for 2019 if you are a Twitter person. So that'll be kind of fun. If you want to catch us all, they're all 10 of us in what we're doing and people are starting already. There's interviews up, already on many folks YouTube channels and, and people are catching them at both the Teams airlifts that are happening, the one that was in Bellevue and the one that's in Amsterdam this week. And there's probably going to be more content coming out before the show as well as live and at the show as well. So that's going to be really cool. Um, you know, Maarten, the last question of all of our, uh, podcasts, um, is talking about sort of looking at, you know, your career and you're a consultant and gosh coming up in the music scene and all the things you've done. Um, I'm wondering if you would share with our audience something, uh, someone or an experience or you know, that really sparked you or inspired you to get to where you are today with us.

Maarten Visser:  Yeah, I gave that a little thought when, when you mentioned that you would be asking this question. And actually the funny thing is here that, that I've, I've been, I'm getting sparks every week. So, so the funny thing is I was thinking about it for a minute when you, when you mentioned this and there, there was no particular occasion or person that came up, but I get inspired by people on, on a weekly or a monthly basis. So when I was doing music, it could, could be like Underworld as a, as a UK band that I was seeing live for the first time and was amazingly inspired by the music they were producing live. And I just said like, wow, these guys understand how this is done. I want to try to go closely to whatever they were doing. Uh, and I was very much inspired by, by their music.

Maarten Visser:  And when I was at my first Microsoft conference, I saw people speaking about a certain technology and I thought, wow, these, these, these people really know how to give a quality presentation. I want to learn how to do that. And, uh, so it, I, I'm not like having a real particular hero that I, that I had, but I had multiple mid-level heroes throughout my life, which sparked my, my energy to, to push myself to, to the next level in, in, in whatever, I felt like that was something that I wanted to, to do or be, become better at. Um, so it would also be books, just this authors of great books who helped me become aware of certain things since I like, yeah, this is the way that I want to lead my life or, or change certain behaviors or, uh, so, and, and that, that, that's funny enough. That's a certain period, uh, where, where that's like a center and at some point something becomes a habit or doesn't or I changed direction. Then it could be the next thing. So, so that would be my answer. So I've, I, I've picked my influencers and, and, and I throughout my life and, and, and many of those have decided certain change points in, in how I approach life and behave during the day.

Heather Newman:  Yeah. Sparks and inspiration all around and as they come, I love it. That's great. Awesome. Well cool. Well Maarten, thank you and thank you for being awesome and being such great friend. Just personally, appreciate that very much.

Maarten Visser:  Right back at you. Yeah.

Heather Newman:  Thank you. Thank you. So, um, Maarten and I, Maarten and I will be community reporting and um, soon and starting up some more of our own stuff, probably preshow and then definitely at the event. Um, he's on Twitter at M V I S S E R and I'm Hedda, H E D D A N E W M A N. and uh, yeah, we're gonna go have a really good time in Orlando, Florida and uh, help each other, um, make some beautiful content for everybody. So, Maarten, thank you for joining us today. I really appreciate it. And sharing with our audience.

Maarten Visser:  I was very, very happy to do so. And I'm very much looking forward to, to the Ignite show.

Heather Newman:  Awesome. Awesome. Well, and say hello to everybody there in, uh, In Amsterdam for me, give them a wave. Give them a Heather Hello if you would. So that's great. Cool.

Maarten Visser:  I will. Good.

Heather Newman:  Awesome. Yay. All right, everybody that has been another episode of the Mavens Do It Better podcast. And we are coming to you from many different channels, your favorite podcasts. Uh, go check it out. Please give us a follow. We love five star ratings on iTunes, if you happen to feel so moved, and here is to a, another beautiful day on this big blue spinning sphere.

Maarten Visser:  Oh yeah.

Heather Newman:  I love it. We're out.

Episode 54: Journaling Maven Mari L. McCarthy

Heather Newman:  Hello everyone. Here we are again for another episode of the Mavens Do It Better podcast where we interview extraordinary experts who bring a light to our world. I'm super excited to have on a wonderful gal today. Uh, Mari McCarthy, L. McCarthy, who is the founder and chief empowerment officer at CreateWriteNow. Mary. Hello.

Mari McCarthy:  Hello Heather. How are you going?

Heather Newman:  I am good. Better now that we're on the phone. So it's wonderful. Um, Mary, where are you coming to us today from?

Mari McCarthy:  I'm coming from a small town called Green Harbor, Massachusetts and it's halfway between Boston and Cape Cod.

Heather Newman:  Awesome. Yay. So, and I today am in my home office here in Marina Del Rey, California. So, um, yay. So Mary and I, uh, had met, you know, kind of online and she just has this beautiful business and um, uh, some great methodologies and I wanted to have her on to talk about them. And so, Mary, will you tell us a little bit about CreateWriteNow?

Mari McCarthy:  Yes. A CreateWriteNow is home of Journaling for The Health of IT. It's, uh, an opportunity, a place for where health conscious people come to learn and discover how Journaling for The Health of IT can help them heal the issues in their tissues and grow and transform and empower themselves to do whatever they want to do or meant to do and then go out and take on the world and share all of their talents with the world.

Heather Newman:  That's amazing. I love it. The wow, that's so much. Will you, um, I know that you know, we always have, uh, an origin story. Uh, would you share with our listeners a little bit about the origin of the business and, and, and the methodologies that you've been creating?

Mari McCarthy:  Yes. Um, about 27 years ago I had, uh, an MS, uh, multiple sclerosis exacerbation. Where I lost, uh, feeling and function on the right side of my body and I needed some physical therapy asap to teach myself how to write with my left hand. So long story short, I, uh, always goal oriented. It's like, okay, I need a procedure cause I was a very high powered business woman. Of course, you know, you have to have everything yesterday and you have to have results instantaneously. Um, I universally or serendipitously or what the hell, whatever, I, uh, met up with a woman at a party. She was hypno-therapist. I told her about my, my goal and she introduced me to Julia Cameron’s Artist's Way. Uh, and in that book, she has a procedure called morning pages. And I got the book and looked it up and I thought, wow, that would be a very easy way to become a left-handed, a good procedure and very logical and easy to do. So I got into that. Well I got into that and it was like, Oh my goodness, Heather. Like, Oh my gosh. And I started hearing rhymes. I started writing poetry. I started getting into my childhood because, I mean, you know, we all had childhoods, but a lot of us it was very emotionally traumatic. We don't tend to remember a whole lot of things. Uh, but I was finding with the morning pages, Oh my goodness, as I'm writing it down. And just writing whatever the, you know, the three pages of stream of consciousness first thing every morning. Oh my goodness. I started remembering all kinds of shapes and sizes and things from my childhood. And, uh, one of the things I, uh, I remembered the process was that I was always left handed, but the nuns changed me when I was a little girl saying to a schools, I was, that's like. Though, it's the, uh, but the purpose for starting the journaling, uh, was physical therapy, uh, purposes but it got me into my emotions, my spirituality, the, the rest of my story, if you will, of Mari McCarthy. And it was like, Oh my goodness, I had to keep going and keep going. And I, you know, then it recovered my, my love for music and always wanting to be a singer and I pursued that. Pursued that. And now I, I'm working on my, my fourth album. So it was a very, it's really interesting. So, uh, I, I say, uh, things happen for a reason. And how interesting, once again, MS pointed me into a, uh, an area that I never ever dreamed I would be into. I always thought that I was a very hardened, a career, a woman, a left brain and all that kind of stuff. But the morning pages and the journaling got me into, um, the rest of my stories I, I said before and it's just like I'm, I'm creative. I'm intelligent. I can, I could write, I can say all this wonderful thing. And then that was my whole thing that, Oh, I have to share this with the world. And just, uh, through all my, my journaling, literally I get universal messages and one day Journaling for The Health of IT came up, and I thought, hmm, isn't that interesting? Cause I've, I've always enjoyed playing with words and having fun with words Journaling for The Health of IT and then I thought, well, I need the name for my company and you know, continue to do more and more and more, uh, writing. And then that's when they came up with CreateWriteNow. So that's all. That's I guess a little bit of a long story of how CreateWriteNow came into being. So an idea that it was also interesting cause one of my, my goals had always been that, um, cause like as I said, I was running a management consulting business, I was traveling all the time. But now I found my house on the beach, another goal. And so I decided that I wanted to run a successful internet company out of my beach front home and boom, it all came together through the help of, of journaling. So I just keep doing it and keep doing it, keep doing it. And it's just like, it makes me where I need to go next as far as coming up with all the, uh, numerous workbooks that I, I've come up with. And it's really a true self-empowering, empowering tool, self-care tool, ultimate holistic health tool, Heather, to help people, uh, understand who truly lives in their, their body, find out who they truly are, and then lit the light and create the life that they want to live for themselves.

Heather Newman:  Yeah. Wow. What an amazing story. And I, I love it's, and everyone it's CreateWriteNow and it's the word create, but it's W R I T E now. So a play on words. It's just fabulous and get going right now. I love that. It's so great. I love your logo. It's so cool. Um, yeah, and I, I, you know what, so I know that my mom was, is left-handed and I believe she had a similar experience in school, um, with nuns, uh, that were trying to change her from being a lefty to right handed. And that's amazing that you figured that out, you know, in the middle of journaling. But I think that's huge. We don't take the time to sort of go back. And I think that, I do, uh, I talk a lot about fear and how a lot of the times we're led by that and that usually there's one thing back in our childhood, maybe more than one, but that is really sort of the trigger for how we live our lives. And when those things go sort of unlooked at or undealt with that they can color every relationship and everything that we have. Um, do you find that people figure those things out when they're working with you on your program? Is that, I'm sure that's gotta be part of it.

Mari McCarthy:  Oh, definitely. That, that is the intent is so, uh, someone said to me, Oh, what you're talking about Mari, you're Journaling for The Health of IT is like we're not talking about, you know, how I spent my summer vacation, we're talking about what really happened a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away called our childhood. And how did we, being the young sponge that we were, we just sucked all that in. We misinterpreted, it's all our fault and all that type of thing. But now as consenting adults, we have the opportunity with journaling to go back into understand, not to relive that the trauma or the tragedy, but to revisit that from an adult observer perspective and understand, Oh, that's what happened. That's where that came from. That's what I thought. Oh my goodness, that's my mother. That's not me. So that's specifically what journaling for the health it is all about. It is therapy. It is having a loving kind guide. The pen, the pen and the page, to take us into the uh, the secrets of our soul, if you will. And all the things that we've been carrying around like, you know, the like I think back to uh, my childhood and, and, and, and realizing how all those things that we were told to stuff down and emotions aren't good, and good little Catholic girls do that. All those things that, and they came with, we have literally, we're literally carrying them around with us in our subconscious in our, as I call it, our issues in our tissues and journaling gives us the opportunity to really do the heavy lifting, the digging and understand where is that coming from, why has that happened? Oh. And then be able to say, Oh okay that was then, this is now. I choose not to carry that or I mean like we can't get completely utterly get rid of it. It is like I am now in charge and I choose not to go in there and keep repeating, repeating, repeating that craziness.

Heather Newman:  We have deep grooves, you know, I call them deep grooves that like they're hard to get out of. You know, it's like the, that deep groove where you think that you've gotten past something and then the universe or you know, whatever you believe in, higher power, you know it seems to me that if something presents itself and you're, you're like, have you really dealt with it?

Mari McCarthy:  Oh, that message is just like, and that's why it's so valuable when you go through that process. It's like, well, it was time to get out the old pen and page and start asking some questions and start figuring out, Oh, what's going on here?

Heather Newman:  Yeah, absolutely. And I think,

Mari McCarthy:  It's back.

Heather Newman:  it's back in and how are we dealing with it? Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Excuse me. I give out, um, I, I'd switched that, you know, the how they soft skills on your resume. And I recently did a webinar about how I want to call those power skills. And those are things to me that are, you know, it's leadership and creativity, but I spent some time on self-care, self-love, drinking water, being hydrated, getting outside and you know, and journaling I think fits right into that. Something as a, as a tool or a practice. Um, this is what I, I love, I loved reading about, so you, because you have different, what you call power journaling courses and will you talk a little bit about your different courses that you have?

Mari McCarthy:  Yeah, they're very practically based. They came out with, you know, um, things that, problems that people have is like, Oh, how do I deal with that? Okay. One is love your body and it's all about learning to develop a relationship with your body. I think the whole premise on a lot, lot of the workbooks, another one is take control of your health. Another one is heal your life. Another one is money management. Uh, and I think that, that they, they're really a practical, I mean they're issues that we have to deal with in life, but we just don't know how to deal with them. And one of the biggest issues is, is us, because we're just so externally focused on saving the world, taking care of the family that, you know, the whole laundry list. This is all about going inside, turning the, uh, uh, the focus, uh, internally. And, uh, these are, uh, tools to help you deal with, uh, issues such as, you know, how do you learn to, to, to love your body? How do you set goals? How do you empower yourself? Those types of things that we certainly never were, uh, taught how to do or even, you know, they never even entered the conversation growing up. it's just like, study for your test, get a good grade, you know, the degree that all that, those type of things. It's not about, you know, to the extent that those of us who were in a very strict religious backgrounds like, again, like sacrilegious to even talk about yourself. It's like your job is to save the rest of the world. So I'm just, uh, I create, uh, uh, workbooks for, uh, for issues that people have to, uh, to deal with it in life. And one of them is, uh, another one I just came out with earlier this year. I on Valentine's day, uh, detox your relationships because, again, we're so, so focused on other people. What will other people say? What will the people do and all I was supposed to take care. All those types of things that we really realized that, you know, people, even family members can be detrimental to your health. And it's all about as a, uh, you know, the whole thing. That's why I call myself the chief empowerment officer. It is really doing the heavy lifting and the digging and dealing with the issues in your tissues. But it's basically once you get uncover the diamond that's been there all the time. It's like going forward and, and using it to just, you know, share your light with the world.

Heather Newman:  Oh, it's wonderful. I mean, even looking through Mari's courses, it's, you know, there's self-healing, self-improvement, courses for writers, self-growth. Um, and I love it. Yeah. I mean you have, I think you're at what, 300 and, in journaling prompts alone and I think you're at, what is it, 378 journaling prompts that you just put on your website, you know, for people to help them in that way. And then I love it that, you know, her, her books and her workbooks, they're, you know, they're at a great price point as well. You know what I mean? Like we spend, you know, 30 or 25 bucks without blinking, you know, on a, on a meal that might not even be good for us. So I love that, uh, the, your title, you know, the chief empowerment and, and that there's all, and that you're specific too, you know, I mean, I think. You know, the Artist's Way is wonderful. I've gone through that myself and you know, that's been around for such a long time and it's so inspiring and, but what I love about what you're doing is really getting into kind of like what you're saying, love your body. I mean, the world does not teach us that for sure. Right. Bombarded by all these images of all kinds of things. And so what Mari has here is just that I love your specificity in, you know, different aspects of loving your body or easing transitions or care for the caregiver. I mean, that one I just wow that so many people don't realize that the caregiver is, it's a hard place to be. Where did that one come from?

Mari McCarthy:  Um, I say it came from, uh, uh, my experience. I broke a couple bones in my foot a couple of years ago and I, I had, uh, I was really, I needed 24/7 nursing, uh, assistance, the process and, uh, and the nurses wanting to saw all these, these wonderful women, they were fantastic and they took really good care of me and all that type of thing. They, the running thing was that, you know, they were taking care of everybody in the world but themselves. And so it's like, they were great, wonderful, uh, nurses and caregivers. But yeah, they weren't given any care to themselves. So that's what was the impetus for that one.

Heather Newman:  Oh, I love it. Wow, that's amazing. And so will you talk a little bit about the recording? Fourth album, that's so inspiring. I was a theater major and sang all through my life and all of that and said, it's a part of my life that I scratched the surface on sometimes. I mean, I use it every day, right? If you're an artistic person, and I think everybody's artistic and creative in everything they do. But talk about getting back into that and what that was like. That's so cool.

Mari McCarthy:  Well, again, it was a very funny, and it was a morning pages got me into remembering my childhood that I always enjoyed music. My mother, uh, not trained me, but introduced me as the great American songbook because in her generation that's what their Saturday nights were, going out dancing and singing and goofing off, so that was the influence. And my father introduced me to classical music and I can remember, uh, that they, uh, was one of our presents growing up, got the family a piano and it's like, I was really excited to get to take piano lessons. So I went to school and there was a try-out, I think around fourth grade for the choral group. And I thought, oh yeah, I'm going to be a real singer and enjoying that choral group. Well, they didn't want me because they told me I was tone deaf and I sang off key. So, uh, and so I just really shut the door on that and just thought, okay, so not good enough. And just carried with me all these, these years, Heather, as I said, thank goodness for journaling because, uh, and the morning pages like, Oh my goodness, like, wait a minute. That was them. That wasn't me. It's just like, of course when you're, you don't have everything to go on stage at the metropolitan opera instantaneous like, but it's like, wait a minute. That's their job. They're supposed to be teachers, they're supposed to help us. So I got all these wonderful insights and understandings by, uh, by doing the journaling. It's like, Oh, I, I get it. So I thought, wow. So again, my goal was to take singing lessons and become a real singer. And less than a month, uh, passed by and in my local newspaper, there was a story about this 30th anniversary of the Kingston school of Music, which it was just a couple of towns away that catered to a students of all ages. That's where I went and I started taking lessons probably about 15 years ago. And then I just thought, and the my first time being on stage, Heather I thought, Oh my goodness, it's like this, this is where it is at for me. So that was just, and I just for this pursued that. And I'm working for the last probably five or six years for, with a gentleman who runs the New York vocal coaching and he's all about, uh, he calls, uh, singers, vocal athletes. And it's all about using your body the way it was supposed to, to get your voice out. And it's just, yeah, unstressing yourself and certainly the breathing and all that, but it's really just helping you, uh, really retrain your, your muscle memory. I'm very pleased to say that I can, I can sing from my body voice from my head voice, form my whistle voice. So it's, and like you said earlier, we all have a talent, artistic, creative talents in us. It's just, you know, a good question we just need to, uh, work with a teacher and practice, practice, practice, work, work, work and get to all the good stuff that's already there inside of us. And so that kept us going and connected with, uh, uh, a guy, working together about 10 years or so now, uh, he has his own recording studio. So I've been doing, recording with that, uh, with, with him. Uh, and now I'm embarking on my first, uh, uh, album that I'm writing the songs myself. So it's like I'm finally combining my love of writing with my love of music. And I, and I, the working title is Practically Romantic.

Heather Newman:  I love it practically, that has, that has so many wonderful meanings, I think. That's so great. So would you, so w for the most part, from the beginning, you've been writing the lyrics yourself and then working with other musicians, is that right?

Mari McCarthy:  Right.

Heather Newman:  Okay. And now you're not only, you're writing the lyrics, but you're also writing music along with it.

Mari McCarthy:  Exactly.

Heather Newman:  That's amazing. Wow.

Mari McCarthy:  Well, certainly a lot of adult supervision needed, but I, I think that, I believe it's because of my work with Justin mind, my voice teacher. I just really, I feel this like there's so, so much inside of us and there are things that, Oh, I'm now really hearing the notes that were there, it's just a fantastic opportunity to just like, Oh my, the notes, the music, the feelings there, now I'm just lending it, letting it rip Heather and let it, let it get going. And it's like I still need some help, but there's, it's, it's more of a 50/50, or less situation as opposed to, uh, uh, you know, my, my musical collaborators having to do all the music.

Heather Newman:  Let her rip. I, that's awesome. I think that's something my mom says too. You know, let her rip or, you know, or what's the other one? It's just if it, if it's not now when, you know?

Mari McCarthy:  right. Well, my favorite is from, from the guys at Nike, you know, just do it. That's what I tell people cause they, Oh, we, you talked earlier about, um, fear, and that's the biggest thing. That's why people don't get into journaling or you know, they say that they're too busy, this and that. But no, it's, it's, we're just carrying around so much fear. And the way you do that is like, you just, you just get the pad just to get the paper. You write a question and then you sit down and you just write, write, write, write, write from your, from your heart and this is something that's new and exciting. But just

Heather Newman:  It's, and don't you find that it's amazing with journaling. This is something I found with a writing coach that I worked with for a long time, Rachel Resnick, was that you don't realize how much you can actually write in a very short amount of time. Like, if you set a timer for like five minutes and write a question and write, you'll be amazed at the amount of pages you get. You know? Do you find that people are surprised at how much they can kind of output through when they're, when they're using your journaling and your books and your courses?

Mari McCarthy:  Yes. It completely blows them away. So it's like, I was having a problem, something I needed to deal with. And it's just like 15 pages later or whatever. They said, and the, they say, yeah, you're right Mari, if you just let her rip and just let it go, just, you know, deal with how do you feel, not, you know, censoring yourself and judgment and the listening to the crazy inner critic and all the kinds of stuff. just do it. Just take a leap. Just do something different. Just go for it. Just think of how you were as a child when you saw that big slide just ran up the top of it and then got down on the slide. So you're, you're right. It's just like once you get into it, and this is not, it's does not have to be a, have to be X number of words or whatever, it's whatever, wherever you are at that point in time. So just go for it. See where it takes you.

Heather Newman:  Yeah. Do you find also that I, I really believe in the power of pen to paper. Um, we're such a digital society and I do a lot of writing. OneNote is my favorite, I'm a Microsoft geek and OneNote's been my friend for a long time. Um, but there is something different about I think taking a pen to paper. And do you find that with your clients as well in your courses, that's a recommendation that you give them of that pen to paper contact?

Mari McCarthy:  Oh no, it is the rule. Journaling for The Health of IT is pen to page every day, end of conversation.

Heather Newman:  Ah, okay. So you're a believer. Yes. Well, and that's what you teach obviously. Yeah, I do. I really do. I think that there's something different about it, right? There's a detachment that comes with technology and, uh, and then just the ability to go back and read it. I mean, I'm, I'm staring here at my bookshelf and one of the bookshelves is all just journals, you know?

Mari McCarthy:  Wow. Great!

Heather Newman:  Yeah. And I don't do it enough. I don't do it every day. I will admit it. Um, I, it's something that I need to put back into my own practice, but, uh, I do, I'm, I'm glad to hear that. Cause I think that's really important that there's that pen to paper, pen to page that just, it's, it's a different connection, you know? For sure.

Mari McCarthy:  And again, yeah, I think that's, and that's what I found when I got into, uh, uh, in the morning pages and started journaling, it's like, Oh my goodness, this is like, this is spiritual, this is emotional, this is everything. This is me. Sounds like. And I am a process as it's like you said. So I was like, Oh. And they essentially, early on, I had the experience once I, before I knew anything about inner critics and things like that, um, I guess I got scared. And so I went back to, uh, keeping it on my computer and I thought this is nowhere. When you've been with the best, you know, you can't settle for the rest. So I just, I got myself in that. Okay, I'm going to have to face my fears that I don't know what's in there, this scaring the living daylights out of me, but I just, I have to get back to it cause I just see all the results. Personally uh, from doing it so it's like, so I don't, it doesn't even mention the conversation. So I just, I just tell people when they talk about Journaling for The Health of IT. It's like pen to page every, every day. But the good news is there's only one real right way to journal. And that's your way. So if you wanted to do it in the morning, if you wanted to do it at the beach, if you want do before you go to bed, whatever, if you want to just do, whatever.

Heather Newman:  That's great. Yeah. Uh, I agree with you 100%. That's awesome. So, you know, the, usually the last question I asked folks, um, and you've shared a lot of this potentially already, but I'm, I'm very interested in moments and sparks that move us or change us or bring us to who we are today. And um, can you maybe share one of those with our listeners? Um, and I know you've shared a lot of your origin story, but is there something or someone or a moment that stands out that you're like, you know what? Yes, this is, this is the one.

Mari McCarthy:  It was the, uh, afternoon of July 19th, 1991 when I was diagnosed with MS. And I, the doctor assured me and showed me my MRI and there was not an inoperable brain tumor. It was only MS. So I thought, phew, it is only MS. I can deal with it. It's time that, uh, so now that my beautiful beachfront home that I, I bought for me to get off the road and change, change gears and find out the rest of the Mari McCarthy story. So I would always say that my inspiration, my gifts, my thank you would always go to my MS diagnosis. Thank you MS.

Heather Newman:  Wow, that's amazing. And, and it does the life gives us things sometimes that, you know, those moments of, of dealing with health or dealing with, you know, trauma and all of that that really do move us to a different plane, to a different, to a different chapter if you will, you know, to keep with the book analogy. So thank you for that. And uh, I know folks can find you at createwritenow.com. And um, that's where all of where Mari's wonderful courses are. Um, her blog and she's got guests, uh, blogging on there as well. Um, Mari, what a joy to talk to you. Thank you for sharing your story and thank you for what you do in the world. It's absolutely wonderful. I appreciate it.

Mari McCarthy:  Well, thank you so much for having me and thank you for giving me the opportunity, Heather. Have a great day.

Heather Newman:  Absolutely. Thank you so much, Mari. Everyone.

Mari McCarthy:  Bye.

Heather Newman:  Bye-bye and thank you. Uh, that has been another wonderful episode, I think of the Mavens Do it Better podcast. You can find us on iTunes, on Stitcher, on Spotify, on Google play, and all those places where you listen to podcasts. We love five star ratings if you happen to give one, and here is to another beautiful day on this big blue spinning sphere. Thanks everyone.

Episode 53: Event maven Allison Gerlach

Heather Newman:  Hello everyone. Here we are again for another episode of the Mavens Do It Better podcast where we interview extraordinary experts who bring a light to our world. And I couldn't be more excited today to introduce all of you to someone who brings a lot of light to my world. Um, my dear friend and colleague Allison Gerlach coming to us from Chicago. Allison, say hi to all of our listeners.

Allison Gerlach:  Hello everyone.

Heather Newman:  Um, ah, goodness, Allison and I, I'll tell you a secret, we're pretty good friends. We've known each other since about 2004, uh, which it seems like it's been longer than that, but um, yeah,

Allison Gerlach:  Yes. I can't remember us not knowing each other.

Heather Newman:  I know, I agree. Um, so hey Allison, will you tell everybody about your cool parade and what you do there in Chicago, working in the arts and doing fabulous things?

Allison Gerlach:  Of course. Um, well I'd moved back to Chicago to be closer to family oh about the fall of 2014. And then I was, you know, just coming off of doing events with you, with Microsoft and Microsoft partners. And so I think that, um, I immediately started working with events and I worked briefly for Columbia College. I produced an event for them called Portfolio Day. But while I was there, I met a gentleman named Mark Kelly, who at the time was the, um, the vice president of student success. And, um, he liked my work on Portfolio Day. I invited a bunch of professionals to come review students' portfolios and it was really well attended. So through that he asked, he said he was art directing a new parade that had never been done before, called the Halloween Gathering, um, with a company called the Chicago Cultural Mile. And he asked if I would like to join that team and work with them and um, and I said yes, I would, I would, I've never produced a parade, but you know, I'm always up for a challenge. And so 2015 was my first Halloween parade. And, um, yeah, I might, you know, and I loved it. I loved being able to contact, because our parade is, is different. There's no politicians. There's um, no corporations, you know, with their logos everywhere. It's a, it's all arts organizations. So we try to use Halloween to shine a light on the artists in our city and kind of proclaim Halloween as, it's the artists' holiday and let's look at all these great organizations, um, in the Chicago area that you might not know anything about. So our parade has grown and grown and grown each year. This year I have over 80 groups that are going to be in the parade on October 19th. We have everybody from, um, Afterschool Matters to this year is the year of Chicago theater. And so, um, the department of cultural affairs and special events have, um, have, uh, donated money to, um, groups that will participate from theater companies. And so I have 14 theater companies leading the parade. So I have everybody, everybody from Black Ensemble Theater to Lookingglass Theater to after, to Synapse Arts About Face theater. Just the list goes on and on.

Heather Newman:  That's a who's, who.

Allison Gerlach:  A whole bunch of great groups. Um, and we, and our parade is really great about bringing in cultural groups. So I kinda have, everybody from the Brazilian Culture Center has been in every year. So has Columbia Fest, um, I've got a really great group that was new last year that's called the Chicago Balinese Gamelan. And if you've never seen those kind of musical performers from Indonesia, they have these, um, these metal-a-phones that they play with mallets and all of these crazy instruments. But they walk down the street and it's, it's really amazing. They had stilt-walker dancers and all sorts of crazy things with them. But it's a fun, it's a fun parade. I mean, Burning Man Chicago is in it. We have fire dancers, we have, we have Playa bikes, um, and all sorts of things.

Heather Newman:  That's awesome. Yeah. I, I, I've been to two of your parades, uh, and loved working on it. Um, it's such a fun event. It is a different, you know, it's all arts and it's at night, right as well?

Allison Gerlach:  Yes. It's a nighttime parade. And we've moved, we started it on Columbus Drive, which was kind of had its own charming quality, cause we, we strung, there's no buildings over there. It's like right by the parks. And so we had cafe lighting strung down the streets and kind of gave it a really nice, you know, vibe. But we've moved it now because it's so popular and people, you know, a lot of times people would come downtown and be like, where's the parade? And they didn't know to go East all the way almost to the Lake. So we moved it now to State Street. So it gets a lot more action as far as, um, you know, the people in the audience. But we have to compete with the buildings on state street. You know, they have their lights on and their business lights on, so, so there's a tradeoff. But, but you know, all is good. Everyone loves the parade and they really enjoy being a part of it.

Heather Newman:  That's super cool. And you mentioned, um, Burning Man, which we just came back from, um, you and I. And is where we actually met. Um, will you talk about, uh, can we talk about Everywhere a little bit? How cool that is?

Allison Gerlach:  Yeah. I got involved with Everywhere. I was brought in by a friend of mine and I started camping there and volunteering. Um, first as a volunteer. Um, I mean I'm still a volunteer but um, I would just like bartend and such in Everywhere. But then I moved on and this year, I was the volunteer coordinator for Everywhere. Everywhere is a space that really, um, it is for kind of telling about what Burning Man does year-round and different, um, types of ways to be involved in Burning Man when you're not, you know,

Heather Newman:  On the playa.

Allison Gerlach:  A lot of people, a lot of people are going to Burning Man events in their own region, in their own town, but some people don't know that they can, they don't have to go all the way out to, um, Gerlach, Nevada. They can actually go to, um, a Burning Man a couple hours from their home and it might be actually, you know, more economically feasible and they can actually, you know, be a part of big art projects that maybe it's not possible for them to do because of geography. And so, we would like to encourage people to, to find their, they're regional burns and people with like-minded, you know, people in their, in their area. And then, um, there are other initiatives that that get taught in Everywhere as you know, as well now. But there is Black Rock Labs where people are talking about, you know, um, ways to um, make a smaller footprint to, you know, sustainable ideas. And so people share ideas of, of innovations that they've come up with. We have, um, uh, we have Burners Without Borders, which is a great organization that helps, that started, you know, with Katrina, that helps, um, you know, using the skills that have been learned by camping in a remote area and creating a temporary city like Burning Man. Um, they are able to use the skills learned to, to help in crisis’s when, when things happen and people need to rebuild and need to create a temporary city because, uh, there's been an incident that's occurred in, in different cities and areas around the world. Um, I don't know what else would you like to know about Everywhere?

Heather Newman:  That's great.

Allison Gerlach:  It's a fun space when you visit Burning Man to go learn about these types of things. And we, we have the, um, we tend to do a kind of variety show daily where people from all over the world can come and perform and share their talents. But, um, but it's connected to the Artery, the artery is the space, which actually, you know, takes care of all the artists that bring the great art out to Burning Man and places them on the playa. It's kind of their art support, um, hub. So we're, we're in a really cool area being, sharing a space with them.

Heather Newman:  Yeah, no, that's, you nailed it. Uh, again. Of course. Yeah. No, it was really fun everyone. So, Allison, I've been to Burning Man, this was my 11th burn, although I hadn't been in five years. And Allison asked me to come and be a part of the camp and be a part of Everywhere Pavilion this year. And so we just got done doing that and it was terrific. And the folks who run the, you know, Josh and uh, it just Jenny Kay and our camp, it was just great, you know, and it was really fun to be a part of. Um, I was one of Allison's volunteers, so she was my boss lady for the week at, uh,

Allison Gerlach:  Yeah. You know, I kinda like it when you’re my boss, but I was happy to be your boss for a week.

Heather Newman:  Yeah. Um, do you remember the first, so, you know, Burning Man is such a beautiful event and you know, it's like when you and I both grew up, we were theater majors, you know, and we got into, you know, doing meetings and events and Allison is a beautiful videographer as far as like, she would do a lot of art direction for me, back when we were doing videos for, uh, for Microsoft. So, we, we started working together after we met actually out at Burning Man in about 2004 and five. And so she was part of the, sort of the Maven crew that went around and helped do all of the events for the Office and SharePoint teams. And so she was part of that. Do you remember your first one by the way? I was, I couldn't remember.

Allison Gerlach:  Yeah, I remember it was, it was the one, there was a launch of, I think it had to been a new Office product because I remember it was the one where there was, there was a hair incident on stage and you know, you know what I'm talking about. I think it was like 2000 and five.

Heather Newman:  Yeah, but that would've been Office 2006 may, I dunno. Yeah, it must've been, it had to be a tech ed or something. I'm not sure. Or

Allison Gerlach:  It was a long time. It was an Office launch at first cause I think I came there. And then from there on you brought me on for tickets.

Heather Newman:  Yeah, I think it was actually the Office Developers Conference and yes, because they started and that conference only like when a couple of times, I don't think it got, it didn't really go, but we worked on all the other SharePoint stuff together anyway. Oh my goodness. That's so funny. So, so theater major. So where are you from? I know this, but tell everybody where you're from.

Allison Gerlach:  I am from Louisville, Kentucky. You know I'm from Louisville, if I say LOO-a-vul.

Heather Newman:  Yes, shout out to KFC, uh, folks and your sweet parents by the way, who I adore. So that's fun. Um, so then, so grew up in Louisville and then off to where for college?

Allison Gerlach:  I went to Denison University in Grandville, Ohio. Where I desperately wanted to be an actress. I was, I started as a theater major, only a theater major. I completed most of my requirements my freshman and sophomore year because I was such a theater geek. And then I was so excited for my junior year because I knew I was gonna be getting lead roles cause I'd done all the leg work, I'd done summer stock theater, I had worked in every department and my junior year there was a new freshmen in town and it was Jennifer Gardner, and she got all the parts.

Heather Newman:  Jennifer Garner moved into town. Oh my goodness. Yeah.

Allison Gerlach:  And then I, you know, I, I realized that, um, you know, the place I was always welcomed was over at the, the cinema department because they always needed someone to be in their movies and they always cast me. I never had to audition. They just said, who can we get? Anybody will do. And I, I, you know, I kind of became the B movie queen of Denison for a while. And then I so, I decided to double major, so I became a double major in theater and cinema.

Heather Newman:  Yeah, absolutely. And then, and then you were in Chicago. Yeah? Which you're in Chicago now.

Allison Gerlach:  I moved to Louisville, Kentucky right after college and I actually used to produce educational videos for, um, American Guidance Service up in Circle Pines, Minnesota. And I actually made educational videos like lying, cheating, stealing, gossip, teasing, prejudice. We would do these little series and we do an elementary school version, a middle schooler version, and a high school version. So I did those and we put them out on CD ROMs. That's how long ago was. You know, you know, I'm turning 50 when I started talking about CD-ROMs.

Heather Newman:  I know, I said CD-ROM and I was talking about, I dunno, corded phones the other day and I was like, Oh my goodness.

Allison Gerlach:  We're old, yeah. So I started there and then I moved up to Chicago and my first job was working as a post-production producer for a company called Editell. And I used to produce the Danny Bonaduce, um, promos for his TV show and we would vivex them. So that was like old cable, coaxial cable wire. We would send the videos through that way to Los Angeles, for them to put, to send out. So that's, that's old technology. We had D2 tapes that were like the size of a suitcase that we had all of our elements on. Yeah,

Heather Newman:  I remember that. What do you think, as far as, you know, like we, we've talked about this a lot, but you know, you, you're talking about this kind of technology and then now you know, I'm sitting here, you know, I have a zoom, you know, H6, four or whatever, you know, and we're on our computers and when we get done this file will be like this big and I can flip it up to this place and you know, Annelise who produces all these, you know, it gonna, like what have you seen or how has it affected, do you think the industry of all of these changes from sort of all the big stuff to like being able to do things on your phone?

Allison Gerlach:  I think it's really exciting. I mean, I really, as much as I love the fact that when I went to film school, I actually shot 16 millimeter film and got to edit on an old Steenbeck editor because we didn't have an Avid to edit on. We didn't have that technology. I mean, I didn't have that. So I just think how exciting to be a film student now and be able to just do it. Like I like, I think that I would have been more confident in those kinds of skills had been, you know, a lot easier, like had it been able to be done on my computer like that. I think there wouldn't have been, you know, I think that, you know, learning it when you're learning it is very important. So I think that, you know, I think just how great. And when I went back to Denison, just recently, my, my film professor retired. And there were more women than men that were majors, you know, like when I'm, I, when it was like eight guys and me, there were like nine of us, you know, and now there's like a hundred in the department and that just is a Testament to how things have changed and, and where things are going.

Heather Newman:  Yeah, no kidding. That's super cool. Yeah. And I think, I think people have had to, you know, we've talked about like shifting, when technology shifts or things shift around us, you have to shift too, you know? That uh, I've found that, you know, remember, I dunno, you probably, we would get, people would get paid a lot of money for like a two minute movie or film or you know, or advertisement. And I think that, have you seen felt that shift in the world too, as far as like what people will pay for content?

Allison Gerlach:  Oh my gosh, , yeah. I mean, it was crazy time and like the late nineties. I mean, if you didn't have a half a million dollars, you weren't doing a commercial. Like it, it was mad like they wanted to do them for $10,000 maximum. Even if it's in France, you know, like it's like no money. So yeah, that was, they, it changed a lot for sure. Yeah. I mean, yeah, when editing, when you went to pay $1,000 an hour and it goes down to like $50 an hour for an editor and you're like, great. Like what's the difference?

Heather Newman:  Completely. Yeah. No, I, I feel like, you know, and, and everything changes that, you know, there's the gig economy and all of that. Like, it allows for, you know, you can get somebody on Fiverr or you know, some of those others to do that sort of work. And it's definitely changed how I think we all interact with each other to do marketing and, and all of that. Um, you know, I wanna I wanted to ask you about will you tell everybody about, um, Figment, as well?

Allison Gerlach:  Oh, sure. I mean, Figment is a project that I've, um, that was started, um, by David Corrin in New York city. Um, I've um, produced a couple of them here in Chicago and last year I just, I helped with it. But it's a cool, it's a cool arts festival that takes place, any city can have a Figment project, they just have to, you know, uh, correspond with, with David and their initiative what they're doing in New York city. But it's kind of a, it can either be a weekend or a one day event, which is kind of a, um, it's an arts festival. Um, uh, with no commercialism that's kind of um, you know, donated, I mean you can do it different ways. You can do it as a neighborhood association. You can do it as, I mean we, you know, in Chicago it kind of went through a Burning Man Chicago, cause those were the types of people that would, you know, bring the art projects and bring it. But it's, but it's meant to be a community builder where you invite the community to come up with stations and kind of, um, activities, um, that are, that are, you know, all ages, family friendly, and you just spend the afternoon just kinda playing in a park and it's a great kind of concept and idea. Um, they've had some really great ones in San Francisco and other, other big cities. I mean, they do them, I think they're, um, global now. Like they have them in China and other places, but yeah, but it's a cool project. It's called Figment project.org.

Heather Newman:  Yeah. That's so cool. So what do you love about producing events?

Allison Gerlach:  I don't know. I think that I have, I am, I like networking with people and I like making people's ideas come to fruition. That's kind of what, so even with my Halloween event, it doesn't seem very hard to come up with 25 people and come up with a creative concept for walking less than a mile. But you know, when you are busy not for profit and you have a million other things going on, just coming up with the little tiny idea that makes your group look so much cooler is, you know, means a lot. So I think that was, you know, part of what my job is to is to contact these groups and make sure that they have the resources they need and if they, you know, they want to add something that, that we, we find a place that they can resource it and, and have it, you know, be affordable and that type of thing. So it, it's been nice like networking with people and having them think outside the box and think of, you know, you don't have to have $1,000 float. This year we have Chicago Children's Theater is one of our grant recipients and they're doing these huge mouths made of cardboard, that open and close. But that's going to look amazing going down the street, you know. But that's, you know, that didn't cost them $1,000, like it cost them everyone, you know, taking recycled boxes and, and some paint and big and getting creative. And so I think that that, that's the exciting part about working with arts events is facilitating artists and helping them, you know, come up with things that work.

Heather Newman:  Yeah. No, I think it's a bit when you, when you're in the producing side of things, um, you know, the backstage right, or the back of house or you know, walking through the kitchen, you know, with the servers and all of that, there's an element of um, uh, MacGyver, uh, plus, you know, just thinking on your feet and um, just being able to come up with those ideas. And I don't know, I think that, I think those theater degrees serve us well for that sort of thing. Right. I don't know

Allison Gerlach:  That comes back to, I used to always be, I mean, poor Dennison when I was so furious that I wasn't getting cast in any of the parts I auditioned for, I kept getting cast as stage manager. I think I got, I kept getting cast for a reason because they were trying to tell me that that was something that I do well. And that's something like when I did corporate events that I liked doing. I liked interviewing people because I like making them feel comfortable talking to me. I really enjoyed being, you know, introducing people who are getting ready to speak and do their PowerPoint presentation and then making sure that their PowerPoint's working and micing them and getting them comfortable before, you know, performing on stage. It's just all of the things that I think come with the territory.

Heather Newman:  Yeah, no, absolutely. Yeah. And yeah, I don't know. What do you think, how many events do you think we were doing a year. Back when they were like kicking it?

Allison Gerlach:  Well, I know for, I know for a fact that I always did. I don't know. It was like I did like three to five for sure with you. I mean, we did every pick ticket and every world partner conference for sure. And then we would, do you know the one in Boston? The SharePoint there.

Heather Newman:  SPTechCon, yeah. I was trying to count the other day about how many events, like we did sort of at the height of that, and I think it got up to 20, um, one time, you know, if you sort of count everything that was going on and all of the events within events.

Allison Gerlach:  I think that when we worked with other partners, like when we were doing other activities, they weren't, you know, a lot of them, you know, when we were doing video and those types of things. I think we were, we were hitting a lot more than, you know, other years. But, yeah.

Heather Newman:  Mmhm. Yeah, for sure. Um, what's your favorite party that we've ever thrown?

Allison Gerlach:  Well, of course I'm going to say the AvePoint red party.

Heather Newman:  Yup. Yup. That was a good one. Miss. Ariana did that.

Allison Gerlach:  Yeah. We had really good parties. We had some good ones.

Heather Newman:  Do you find that people are still throwing big parties like that in Chicago?

Allison Gerlach:  You know, now that I've mean the last five years I've been in my, you know, my parade world, so I am not sure exactly, you know, what kind of parties people are throwing. I don't even go to the, you know, the AACP or AIC ones anymore. But, but yeah, I still think so. Yeah.

Heather Newman:  Yeah, I think so too. I think there's like, um, there's a, it's about experiential, you know that word. You're, are you hearing that word a lot? Experience and experiential.

Allison Gerlach:  Oh yes, in fact, you know, I think that, you know, cause it might, you know right now it may my parade job is a contract job, so I work kind of, you know, spring to October on this particular job. But I think that a lot of the jobs that I've been, you know, working with and you know, even when I worked with Sony and I did pop up stores, a lot of experiential event work is, is where people are going out cause they like having social media moments and things that people can, you know, fall, you know, chance into and fall upon. And that takes a lot more planning than something that is staged and can be controlled.

Heather Newman:  Yeah, I agree. I, that's some of the things I saw this year that Microsoft did is like there was a, you could walk into what looked like a Starbucks and you could see how all of the machines were hooked up to that sort of BI tracking behind them. And there was another one that was like set up like Kroger and you could see where they'd put up the AI cameras that would tell you if you pulled something off the shelf. And, and that's a lot of that stuff you did with Sony I think too. Right?

Allison Gerlach:  Well, the Sony, I toured, we did it, we had a competition. So I went to every camera store around the country giving demos for the 87 camera. But we were, it was in Alaska. Like they'd walk in and it was an Alaska scene and they'd take pictures of a model, you know, sitting in front of a mountain in Alaska. And yeah.

Heather Newman:  I like that approach. You know, I keep seeing more and more of it and I think that allows, um, for better storytelling. You know, like, I've been writing and reading about, you know, storytelling and, and uh, I just, I came across it, it's like 22% people respond, uh, and comprehend 22% more when you actually add story into sort of the facts, the figures and the like, I dunno, uh, features of something and I think, I dunno how, how, how do you find, do you find people want to build narratives? I think you're doing that with your parade obviously. I'm seeing it a bit. And do you guys do a theme for the parade besides Halloween?

Allison Gerlach:  We've, we've just started doing the theme the last two years. Last year and then that's a way that we kind of, um, reach out to our groups. Last was the, the year of Chicago Youth.

Heather Newman:  Okay.

Allison Gerlach:  We had grants that went to youth organizations that really had never participated in the parade before. And a lot of them, even though they're not getting a grant, of course they signed up again because they're students had such a great time. So this year we are Chicago theater. We had, you know, we Lookingglass has always been a great supporter as well as the Broadway in Chicago, but we didn't have a ton of other theater groups. This year we've got over 20 theater groups, you know, all over, you know, being a part of our parade. So I'm very excited. You know, it, it, it kind of gives us, next year is the year of Chicago music. So, you know, I’m going to be loving that.

Heather Newman:  Yeah, no kidding. Yeah.

New Speaker:   That's my favorite.

Heather Newman:  I think you probably have one of the most eclectic music tastes of anybody I ever known. And I always love it. You know, you definitely

Allison Gerlach:  I'll blame it on WDUB 91.1 FM in Granville, Ohio, where I was a DJ for the first time. I love music, I do. I Kind of feel like I should have had a career in music, but you know, I'm not dead yet.

Heather Newman:  Yeah. Well. And you did, um, this was what, the second or third year you were on BMIR radio at Burning Man?

New Speaker:   I've done it more than that. I think it’s probably been at least five years.

Heather Newman:  Oh sweet. Okay. Yeah, that's super fun. So, everyone who doesn't go to Burning Man, there's a radio station that happens, um, at the event and uh, at BMIR and Allison did a couple of sets and she's done them for years now too, so yeah, she's great on that. You had a

Allison Gerlach:  It's really fun, I love of being on Burning Man information radio. It's a kick.

Heather Newman:  Yeah. That's super fun. I like that cause with the going after sort of like youth or theater or whatever, it's, it's uh, yeah, it's a great way to target to get more people to one know about the festival and then, you know, they probably want to hopefully be a part of it after they've, you know, so they'd come on with that focus and they stay with you probably because they have a good experience. Cause you're awesome at what you do and it's a really cool event.

Allison Gerlach:  Well the, the event, it's, you know, it's, it's easy. It's, it's on state street. It's only a two hours long. It's from 6:00 PM to 8:00 PM, which is a great time for, for parents to take their kids because even if they're young, you know, bedtime at 8:00 PM we're done by 8pm and then get home. But uh, but the, the groups who participate, what we really like is having major institutions walking with youth organizations. So I love the fact that, you know, that the Joffrey Ballet is walking with, you know, these little dancers from Volta Art or from, you know, dance, um, you know, Bance Chicago or by Pally Chicago, like a different groups inspired different groups like, and it's just nice that they're adults walking next to kids and kids can look up and be like, wow, that's really cool. I'm in the city parade with them.

Heather Newman:  right. That's super cool. Yeah, I like that.

Allison Gerlach:  Encourage children to have careers in the arts.

Heather Newman:  Yeah. That's fantastic. So you're a busy woman. How do you chill out?

Allison Gerlach:  Oh, my goodness. I don't think I do. Not the not in the month of September. Ask me in November.

Heather Newman:  Right. I guess. What do you, what do you love about Chicago? You've lived there a long time and,

Allison Gerlach:  You know, when I, I, I love Chicago. I think that when I moved, um, back, you know, in 2008 and when I moved out to California, I kind of thought, Oh my gosh, I'm never going back to that snowy place. And no, and I think that when I came back to move to be closer to family, like I really have loved being back and I kind of realize that, you know, that these are my people, you know, that these, the Midwest people are my people and, and I, and I feel like, you know, I have, I've, I've re-found my home that I just forgot was my home for eight years.

Heather Newman:  Yeah, that happens. It happens for sure. Yeah. I love the Midwest too. And, um, it was fun going back to Michigan this summer, you know, for, for a brief visit to see my people as well. So I'm hoping to spend a little bit more time with you there.

Allison Gerlach:  Well, you're welcome anytime.

Heather Newman:  Thank you. Um, this has been awesome. I just, I love this parade and I've loved being involved with it and I just, it's, it is so different and cool. And um, I love the connections that you have sort of from all of that, like into the Burning Man community and the arts community and how you're just, you always are bringing people together. And that's a, that's a big cool deal, hun, and you’re so good at it.

Allison Gerlach:  Ahh, thank you. I mean, I feel like this year, well this year we tried, like the last two summers we've tried something new because like we really want to get like regular people in different neighborhoods to jump up and participate if they feel like, and so we've been doing these Lantern Walks along the Chicago river walk in the summer, so we have been teaching people how to make lanterns and trying to get other things going. So I just think that as much as we can tell people that even though you're not professionally trained in the arts, that doesn't mean you can't express yourself. And that's one of the things I love about Burning Man is that, you know, you see so many people that go out there that they might be a lawyer in their day time, but they have made this rock outfit like, you know, rock star outfit that they come out in and they really are showing, you know, their inner artist. And I think we all have that.

Heather Newman:  Yeah, no, I agree with you. I mean, yeah, people that are I'm not creative or I'm not this and I'm not that. And everything we do has artistic quality and merit, you know, some, some more than others. But yeah, I love organizations and events and experiences that let that fly free, you know, which is really super cool. Um, well I adore you one, and, and it's so funny talking to somebody, you know so well on a podcast in a way. So it's quite lovely. Um, but I always ask, uh, for the last question, uh, what, if you can point out, uh, uh, person, place or thing or time or something that really sparked you to do what you do and you know who you are today. If you could pinpoint one or two that you would feel free sharing with our listeners?

Allison Gerlach:  Wow. No wonder you didn't give me the questions in advance.

Heather Newman:  That's the only question!

New Speaker:   Well, I know, I think that, um, I do think that my very first time, like when I went to Burning, when I read about it in Wired magazine, when I read about Burning Man with my friend Denise Gerhety, who got me to go my first year, um, I had no idea how much going to that festival in 1998 would change kind of the, the scope of the type of work I do and, and, and what I do. But it did, I think that it had a really big impact on me. Um, you know, I'm sure there's many things in my life that had a big impact on me. Like, you know, switching from theater to cinema and then working in, in film for most of my career. But I think that when I went out and saw Burning Man and I saw these large-scale art and spectacle type pieces, I think it kind of led me to what I'm doing right now. Where it'll take me, you know, after those who knows, but, but that's, that's where I am now.

Heather Newman:  Yeah. That's awesome. Yeah. Well, Denise Gerhety, uh, gave me my tickets too, so as we like to say, it's all her fault. So

Allison Gerlach:  Yeah, we'll blame her. And we'll toast to her. So, yeah.

Heather Newman:  Yes. A big cheers. Love to Denise. For sure. So, and all of our campers out there, so we've got this, uh, beautiful parade coming up in less than a month. Yeah?

Allison Gerlach:  Yeah. It'll be October 19th. If you're in the Chicago area, you're not gonna want to miss it. We got some great groups.

Heather Newman:  And its a, so is it something, um, I know it's changed, but like five o'clock, six o'clock?

Allison Gerlach:  Oh, it steps off at 6:00 PM. So, you probably want to get down there around 5:30 and find a spot or earlier, you know, there'll be people you know, clogging up state street, but it starts at Lake street and ends at Van Buren.

Heather Newman:  Awesome. That's great. Oh, you know who else? You know, I, I had on, um, your beautiful poet friend that, uh, she is, she made me cry. Carron Little. Yeah. She just was amazing and read this beautiful poem and yeah, we had a great chat, um, on one of the pods a couple of weeks ago, so it was kind of fun. So thank you for that. She's a Chicago based artist, folks that's a poet and she does a lot in arts, uh, grants and um, arts advocacy and stuff and Allison connected her with me, which was really good.

Allison Gerlach:  Yeah, I thought you guys would like each other cause she's working with the women's March here and that type of thing too.

Heather Newman:  Yeah, no, it was super awesome. So that's great. Cool. And then, um, you know, a little bird knows that you're gonna be with me for Ignite in Orlando.

Allison Gerlach:  I'm very excited to be your official handler. Make sure that you get all the interviews down perfectly.

Heather Newman:  Yeah, probably that's a good, need some help as a community report running around, so, but yeah, so Allison will be there with me, which will be great. So

Allison Gerlach:  Yeah, it will be great to see all the people I've, I've missed seeing everybody.

Heather Newman:  Yeah, absolutely. That'll be super fun. So, and then we round into the new year and I don't, I don't know. Do you have any big plans for the new year?

Allison Gerlach:  You know, I am. I don't have any big plans for the new year. I just, I plan on, um, celebrating the entire year. It's my 50th year. I think that I should, you know, do great things in 2020.

Allison Gerlach:  I know. I was kind of leading you along that since it is your big five-0. So, yeah, it's like we're going to celebrate all year long, so that's awesome. Cool. Well great. Well, honey, thank you so much. I, I love you. I adore you and I've been wanting to have you on for a while to tell everybody about all the cool things you do in the world. So.

Allison Gerlach:  Oh, well I really appreciate it. And thank you for promoting our little event, our little big event here in Chicago. And yeah, I really feel free to cut out whatever you want.

Allison Gerlach:  Not a, not a word. Nary a word. All right. Thank you, honey. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Awesome. Yup. Uh, so everyone that has been another episode of our Mavens Do It Better podcast. Uh, you can find us on Stitcher, on iTunes, on Spotify, on Google play, all of the great places where you normally find us. And here is to another beautiful day on this big blue spinning sphere. Thanks.